I sat down one night and wrote the line rock, rock, rock everybody.
And in that confirmation process, I sat for 17 hours in front of a senate judiciary committee.
I wanted to be a cartoonist. I was one of those kids who sat around and drew in my room all the time.
I will be brief. Not nearly so brief as Salvador Dali, who gave the world's shortest speech. He said I will be so brief I have already finished, and he sat down.
It was 1988, I believe, that I met Grit. We were both appearing in a Canadian Folk Festival and as we sat backstage he handed me his guitar. I played it, loved it, and then found out that he'd made it himself.
The world is full of people who say, 'But I had that idea first,' but did they do anything about it? Nope, they sat on their bum dreaming.
Our next-door neighbour taught physics at Hampton University. Our church abounded with mathematicians. Supersonics experts held leadership positions in my mother's sorority, and electrical engineers sat on the board of my parents' college alumni associations.
Once upon a time, I sat in my mother's lap as she turned the pages of Golden Books, and I gradually learned to read.
A woman said to me when she first sat down, You're photographing the wrong side of my face. I said, Oh, is there one?
My dad sat me in front of the TV, and instead of putting on Nick Jr. or something, he put me in front of 'Jailhouse Rock' and all the Elvis movies.
In the morning he was lying dead on one of the beds fully clothed. He was dead. I got the impression he wanted to go, and I must have killed him. I can't remember strangling him. I just sat there shocked.
I'm always amazed by writers who say, 'Oh you know I had a half hour so I sat down and wrote a little bit.' I just need a real big chunk of time to sit down and focus. That's my process.
I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter - now, computer - lit up a cigarette.
We finally sat down and asked ourselves how much of our lives we wanted to give everybody. We had just given a little too much, and it started to become a burden.
We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that.
I often heard about his cases and I often sat in on his trials. In the late 1960s when I was growing up I wanted to be a crusader like him but I didn't want to wear a suit and commute.
I've never sat down and thought about the difference between plot and theme. To me, that's never been important.
I train my chefs completely different to anyone else. My young girls and guys, when they come to the kitchen, the first thing they get is a blindfold. They get blindfolded and they get sat down at the chef's table... Unless they can identify what they're tasting, they don't get to cook it.
I came face-to-face with a gorilla which was quite good, but it was a 10-hour trek in bad weather, up hills, covered in mud, with mosquitoes everywhere and when we got there the gorilla's just sat there doing nowt.
It was a lot of fun on the set. I had the most fun making that movie out of all of them. I'm sure if I sat and thought about it, but none that I could think of offhand.
When I was young, I went to a church where the lighter-skinned you were, the closer you sat to the altar.
'The Indian Runner' was easy. It had been incubating in me for eight years, and by the time I sat down to write the thing, I had all the pictures in my head.
The first time I had sat down to a meal I had grown on my own, along with a bottle of wine that we had made, I burst into tears. To be in touch and be in tune with that is an extraordinary gift.
I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl's 'James and the Giant Peach'.
Basically, as soon as I saw that there was a role available on '24,' I jumped at it, and then when I sat down and talked to them, it seemed to get more interesting and more fun.
I actually went to some Gamblers Anonymous classes, and I sat there for three or four of them, and I'm trying to figure out what I have in similarities with these other people, and I could never find anything. It just seems like it wasn't the right place for me.
When I have sat at home with this God-given talent for music for a long time, somebody approaches me out of the blue and asks me to play for them. It's almost as though there's a force somewhere which is saying 'no sittin' around, out you go!
I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty... you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.
We have sat on the river bank and caught catfish with pin hooks. The time has come to harpoon a whale.
I was taken to concerts when I was six, seven years old, and sat in a box throughout the whole evening.
When I sat in rooms with middle-aged white men, I heard them speaking like young black men in America. They had been solidly middle class for the majority of their working careers, but now they were feeling angry, disaffected, and in some cases, they actually had tears in their eyes.
Fortunately, John Houseman is a marvelous writer and he sat in on so many story conferences. He worked with Welles, you know, and he's a marvelous man.
I was in a movie called 'Before & After' with Meryl Streep. I was edited out of the movie, but no one told me. I think I was 18 or 19 years old. I sat across from her and asked her every question about acting. I completely embarrassed myself.
When I took the SAT, I didn't get accepted into a single white school that I applied to. Now I've got honorary degrees from a lot of those schools that rejected me. Things are different now, but not that much different.
The first thing I said if I sat on the Iron Throne would probably be, 'Ouch!' It's actually painful because it's made of swords. But my first Royal Edict would be, 'Somebody get rid of this damn chair!'
My first game, I played the first play of the game and called a timeout and got sat down, got benched for the rest of the game, and we won the game. It was the longest day of my life. Long day. Very embarrassing.
