Comedy always came easier for me. But I would have loved to have been an action hero.
I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.
My dad's American, and my mom's French. I lived in France for the first 18 years of my life, then came here to go to school at the College of William and Mary. I studied marketing. I really didn't know what I wanted to do, so I thought that's what I should do - study business - because it would give me the best chance to find work.
I did once shatter a chandelier. I was singing with my college choir in Wales. I was the soloist and I hit the high note and there was this massive bang and all this glass came down from the ceiling. I'd like that to be my party trick if I can perfect it.
Cuba came to be the last country to get rid of Spanish colonialism and the first to shake off the heinous imperialist tutelage.
After Plan Colombia came the Colombian Free Trade Agreement. Hillary Clinton opposed the treaty when she was running against Barack Obama in 2008 but then supported it as secretary of state.
Female influence came from my grandmother and my aunt. They would sing Corsican love songs while cleaning the house and dress all in black and say melodramatic things like: 'I want to die.'
My desire to be an artist really came out of being broke and unemployed and incapable of holding a job down. That's what it was driven by for sure.
I've lived in New York for 40 years. I came right after college.
I came to magic absolutely hating magic on a very, very deep level.
At a young age, I was interested in comic books, which was really how I learnt to read. The name Cage came from a comic book character called Power Man.
No boxer in the history of boxing has had Parkinson's. There's no injury in my brain that suggests that the illness came from boxing.
My grandfather and his wife came to America at the end of the 19th century from Hungary. Everyone started out on the Lower East Side. They became embourgeoise and would move to the Upper West Side. Then, if they'd make money, they'd move to Park Avenue. Their kids would become artists and move down to the Lower East Side and the Village.
Title IX came along and changed a lot of things for the better, but nevertheless, it meant that money became more important.
I came from a traditional family, and it was an exciting but challenging transition to move to America and live on my own. The world around me was suddenly so different.
My grandmother was born in Russia, and she came through Poland on her way to America in the early 20s. She moved to Brooklyn.
I wasn't expecting two seconds of me on the medal stand to go viral after the Olympics. I came back to my room after the medal ceremony, and my dad said this picture of me doing a face I don't even remember making is blowing up.
As a vegetarian eating a plateful of eggs, I found myself in this weird place where I didn't want to think about where those eggs came from. I didn't want to think about the treatment of the animals who produced those eggs. When I find myself trying not to think about things, it seems to me that I'm practicing avoidance.
Mostly I want to talk positive; I wanna talk about a bunch of great kids that I coached and made me look good and the university that I've seen grow from a cow college, which it was, only 12,000 people, and when I came here, we weren't at Pennsylvania State University, we were at Penn State College.
Growing up in Dumfries, I got no sun - I spent all my time in my room making records. When I came to America, it made me recognise the benefits of sunlight. Oh, and I also got a good haircut. I used to have a terrible haircut.
Since 'Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights' came out, I've done a fair amount of public speaking, and the two statistics that always make the audience sit up are that nearly one in three women will have had at least one abortion by menopause and 61 percent of women who have abortions are already mothers.
I came to New York when I was eighteen years old, and the first audition that I ever went to was this huge cattle call at the Equity building where I had gone two days earlier to sign up - I didn't have an agent or anything. It was for 'Chicago.' There were probably three hundred people there.
'Serial Mom' tested really well when we finally got with the right audience. But they would go to some shopping mall in a deep, deep suburban L.A. neighborhood where they knew people would hate, and they just wanted to spend money to prove that people wouldn't like it. The movie was not a success when it came out.
When I came to America, I told my dad I wanted to be an actress.
I seemed to vow to myself that some day I would go to the region of ice and snow and go on and on till I came to one of the poles of the earth, the end of the axis upon which this great round ball turns.
Singing in Yiddish was a great thrill for me and came about through Joe Papp, the founder of The Public Theater.
When I got out of the army, I had the G.I. Bill. Since I had no high school education or anything like that, I came to NYU, and they took a chance on me and let me in.
Even when Facebook came out, and I was in college, I found myself never putting anything on it.
My father wasn't a hard guy. He was a well-liked guy. He had a lot of compassion about things in life. There were rules, but there was also flexibility within those rules. He didn't push me when it came to golf: he just taught me the right way to play the game.
When it came time to be a professional rapper, I wouldn't sign anything without reading it. There was no way I was going to have people make decisions for me or wake up one day and find that I was broke because I never bothered to read a contract.
I was good at football and cricket at school. My dad said, 'Son, be an architect,' and I came to Melbourne passionate about becoming an architect.
If I hadn't had a childhood career, I probably would've signed a contract with the first person I came across.
I was on holiday recently and I came home to find that one of the papers here had 'bikini'd' me on the beach. I was wearing a grossly unflattering costume and they had published photographs of me taken from behind. I looked dreadful. I went into our local newsagent and bought up every copy.
I remember 'Hannah Montana' came out, and I was so depressed, I started crying because I was like, 'I want to do that.'
We are from the very middle class family. We have not come from the English medium school. We came from our regional languages school.
I've always been entranced when it came to musical comedy; it's probably my favorite thing. It's a real true American form, and it's big, like Shakespeare big, when it's right. It's loud, and it's big: you have to be ready vocally and physically. It can bring people to their feet and can be as thrilling as a circus.
