How did I become a star? I don't know how it happened. When I look at my old pictures, I can't tell how it happened!
Traditionally, what we in the news business do is cover what happened yesterday.
I was told at first that being different was a bad thing. Everywhere I went, it was just, 'You're too different'... And it turned out that being different was the best thing that ever happened to my career. It is why people travel to my shows. It's why people want to hear my story and buy my book.
What happened to me is I gained a little weight so I could be more accessible to people. They're not like, 'Oh my God, he's, like, a male model comedian; yuck, ugh.' It's like, 'Oh, he's a little squishy; He's like me. He's accessible.' And girls are like, 'Look how cuddly he is. I just want to cuddle up in his neck fat and go to sleep.'
The thing that happened in Ferguson touched many of us in a specific way.
I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.
I've got to where I've always wanted to be. I just feel more myself, and I've learned not to care what other people think. It's happened slowly, very slowly. But I did it.
Donald Trump has been horrendous, saying things are bad because of Muslims or Mexicans. This is exactly what happened in the 1930s in Germany, and it's gonna get worse.
Sometimes it feels like the feminist movement never happened.
I cannot appreciate anybody who creates controversy over things which do not exist. I can tolerate controversy over things which truly happened, but not over inexistent things.
That sense of what happened in Europe in World War II has shaped a lot of my views.
Every day I am being told to sign up for Tumblr, Yammer, Friendfeed, Plaxo, Last.fm, ping.fm or the hot social-media tool du jour that happened to get mentioned on Mashable.com. It is like a social-media arms race. Each one of these new tools is like a cool new night club. Hot today, gone tomorrow, replaced with something else.
I used to do a lot of comedy. I don't know what happened. I think it's my face.
I've seen a ghost in my bathroom with no face, this is true by the way, and I had a yo-yo that rolled up a hill in my apartment. My place is a little slanted. I have no idea how that happened.
You know what I think happened? After 'Rocky,' I was almost set up in the eyes of the media to make a flop.
It has so happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.
The journey from engineering to acting just happened. I guess some things are meant to be.
One of my mentors early on was Eli Harari, the founder of SanDisk, who happened to be a friend of my dad's.
Slavery is something that is all too often swept under the carpet. The shame doesn't even belong to us, but we still experience it because we're a part of the African race. If it happened to one, it happened to all. We carry that burden.
I just made the decision that I was going to try comedy, and if didn't work, then I knew it didn't work. Then I would go back and do whatever. But at least I wouldn't torture myself the rest of my life, wondering whatever would have happened.
When you hit your 40s, you're walking around, and you realize, 'Oh, my God, men don't look at me anymore.' Or sometimes you can feel really good, and then you look in the mirror, and you're like, 'Oh, Jesus, that's my face now!' But I have tell you that something happened and shifted inside of me.
Becoming a mother is the best thing that's happened to me.
Being from Africa is the best thing that could have ever, ever happened to me. I cannot see it any other way. All of my fundamental principles that were instilled in me in my home, from my childhood, are still with me.
When you hear 'experience,' that's all about resume. And Obama didn't have the resume. But we knew, long before that, 'steady in a crisis' was much more important than 'experience.' When you watched the presidential campaign, you saw that Obama was the one who happened to be steady... He demonstrated aspects of his character people were hungry for.
It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.
My life used to be like that game of freeze tag we played as kids. Once tagged, you had to freeze in the position you were in. Whenever something happened, I'd freeze like a statue, too afraid of moving the wrong way, of making the wrong decision. The problem is, if you stand still too long, that's your decision.
When it came to 'Binge,' it wasn't my intention to get on a little soapbox and have a teaching moment. It was more, 'Here are things that have happened to me; here's what I've learned from it. If you'd like to learn from it too, great; if you just like the entertainment aspect, that's fine too.'
When I look back, I am happy that my mum took me to the gymnastics club. I didn't join gymnastics to become a famous athlete or celebrity; it just happened - I did more than I expected, of course.
Andres Segovia, the great name for guitar, he put classical guitar on the map. He was the proponent of it, the best in the world. So I was listening to a record that he had made, and a little bauble happened in the middle of the record. A finger slipped, and I said, 'Wait a minute. He's not allowed to make mistakes,' - my mind.
When I came out, I was 68, and I was totally prepared for my career to recede when I spoke to the press for the first time. What happened after that blew me away. I started getting more offers. My career blossomed.
I'm part of a great job where I get paid to learn. My first brush with the world of showbiz happened when I got selected while I auditioned for 'Dhoom Machao Dhoom' at my college in Delhi.
Mine's going to be the best book tour that ever happened!
I thought that communism, the tyranny of communism, was an abomination and I beseeched God to bring that terrible evil down and he did. It was a great triumph, it took awhile, but it happened.
I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence.
What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: 'Oh no, we're not.'
After the crash happened, I was so humiliated and embarrassed. I thought of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, that they must hate me.
