I always wanted to be a father and thought it would be great, but it just took the right woman and the right time to make it all happen.
I thought I wanted to go to drama school or university, and that would have been a completely different life. But what got me was the sound, and hearing it. Hearing everything so loud, I loved that back in the studio. I loved that from the very beginning.
I went to a radio station on Long Island in 1982, and thank goodness for me, it was so new that there was no receptionist. So the DJ opened up his booth, and took my tape and listened to it and thought it was a hit song.
I've never thought of it consciously... I say exactly what I think, and very often it's totally politically incorrect. I get, always, chastised for it. So it's not shtick. But I think I'm the one who says, 'The emperor has no clothes.'
I've always thought photography is not so much of an art form but a way of communicating and passing on information.
I've always had a real interest in the way that science fiction can portray a world that could be different to our world, which I find a really exciting thought.
Both Mum and Dad were converts to Catholicism, and normally if you convert to Catholicism you have thought about it more than someone who just grew up with it, taking it for granted.
I thought I'd write a massive postmodern novel about Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood, but it turns out they couldn't have met because the first mention of Robin Hood appears 60 years after Richard died.
All of us that have teams want to pick the right people. I've thought a lot about that. In the NFL, we've got 13 scouts traveling the country. We're trying to pick 22 year-olds coming out of college who will be successful in the NFL. It's very hard to do. What I've learned is it's always character first.
I would even say that my parents, and their friends in our community, thought of education as a kind of armor against racism.
I made four comedies, and all did well, but I always wanted to do an action film. When I saw 'Singham,' I thought this was the right film. Many stopped me, saying, 'You are doing so well in comedy, why do you want to make this film?'
I'd thought of myself as a great big motion picture star from the time I was 6.
I don't think I thought I was going to go into music, and I don't think it hit me until I was 13 or 14, and then I was gone. Just like that. At that point, there was nothing else that could keep my attention.
Even if there is endless documentation, it would be impossible to know what a man thought inside his own mind... This is where the novelist's creative imagination has to take over.
I'm terribly nostalgic, but I'm with the Elizabethans who thought nostalgia was a disease. It's a dangerous place to be because you can get caught up in it.
I always loved movies, but I never thought I would presume to be a screenwriter and definitely not a director.
I was a standup comic, which doesn't necessarily mean you interact with people all that much. In fact when I did shows, I wouldn't talk to the audience very much. Then my friend offered me a radio show, and I thought, you know, I'll try talking to people and see what kind of interviewer I was.
We found out that, contrary to what many people thought, in the immune system, genes can change during the life cycle of the individual.
I used to be so self-conscious about my braces that people thought I was shy - I just never talked. It took me a long time to realize, whatever, it's not like I'll have them forever, so I might as well enjoy it while I do!
When I decided to write 'The God of Small Things', I had been working in cinema. It was almost a decision to downshift from there. I thought that 300 people would read it. But it created a platform of trust.
It's been one of the most painful things I've ever been through in my whole life: trying to understand the degree to which behaviors that I thought were totally appropriate were destructive.
I never thought of myself as a really particularly great singer.
What it turns out is that we think we're multitasking, but we're not. The brain is sequential tasking: we flit from one thought to the next very, very rapidly, giving us the illusion that what we're doing is doing all these things at once.
I was in Toronto with my parents, and my dad took me to an outdoor hockey rink. I was 3 or 4, and I just remember everything about that day. For some reason, I thought, 'This is it. This is what I'm supposed to do.' And this is around the time that Gretzky came to L.A., so I immediately joined a hockey league.
I never in a million years thought I would be the person to go to for self-esteem; that was not my intent. But I happen to love beauty, I love the way people look, and I love making women look beautiful.
I wish I knew at 14 not to put much thought into what other people my age said to me, cause we were all looking for the answers. So I wish I knew that other people really don't know any more than you do!
Usually, I walk around and think about things. When I come across a thought that makes me laugh, I write it down.
The 'Saw' sequels went in a direction I wouldn't have gone in. With 'Insidious 2,' I wanted to push a potential franchise in the direction I thought it should go in.
When I was 17, I studied at RADA in London for the summer. I wanted to live abroad and to pursue drama, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity. I thought I may as well throw myself in at the deep end. My first big role is in 'Starlet.'
You know how sometimes you hear a chord played on an organ and you can feel it vibrating in your bones? Sometimes when I'm writing, I can feel my bones vibrating because I'll have a thought or I'll have a character's voice in my head, and that's when I know I'm on the right track.
Madonna was very cool. I thought she was really nice, really present, and she worked really, really hard... She didn't necessarily know our real names in real-life, because why should she? Who cares? Some of the cast were really offended, like, 'She doesn't even know my name!' I'm like, 'Who cares? Madonna's doing our show. It doesn't matter.'
Historically, the French have had a romantic attachment to their bikes. Though the first functioning two-wheeler is thought to have been invented by a German in 1817, it was the French who popularized and marketed the device in the 1860s, giving it the name 'bicycle.'
Acting was what everybody thought I should do, and at 15, when you love something so much, it's like - 'That's not what I do. That's what they do.'
I was honoured when they asked me to appear at the president's birthday rally in Madison Square Garden. There was like a hush over the whole place when I came on to sing 'Happy Birthday,' like if I had been wearing a slip, I would have thought it was showing or something. I thought, 'Oh, my gosh, what if no sound comes out!'
I wanted to be a novelist from a very early age - 11 or 12 - but I don't think I ever thought I would write historical fiction. I never thought I might write academic history because I simply wasn't good enough!
I remember in high school thinking that I wanted to be a lawyer, and now I realize I saw that movie 'And Justice for All' when I was a kid and thought, 'That's what lawyers do, and I want to get up and yell and scream in the middle of a courtroom.'
