I was the youngest child and really spoiled. I loved to play make-believe. I loved pretending to be all kinds of different people and it just seemed natural that I would go into acting.
Meat-fetishiser that I was, I used to find willed vegetarianism inexplicable. It was one thing to be a vegetarian because of religious and caste reasons - something I was familiar with because of my Indian upbringing - but to choose to be a vegetarian when you could eat meat for every meal every day? That seemed madness to me.
'The Simpsons' was about children and married parents; 'Futurama' is about people in between; they're growing up and haven't settled down. Every other cartoon show seemed to be, you know, dumb dad, bratty kids.
I was struck after 9/11 by what seemed the assumption that everyone bereaved by that event was suffering the same thing. I wanted to explore how individual grief is, how complicated, how colored by the complexity of the mourner's relationship with the person who's died.
In my dreams and visions, I seemed to see a line, and on the other side of that line were green fields, and lovely flowers, and beautiful white ladies, who stretched out their arms to me over the line, but I couldn't reach them no-how. I always fell before I got to the line.
I'm going to be honest. Up until I started work on Bumble, the 'f-word' scared me. People would ask me if I was a feminist, and I didn't know how to respond. The word seemed to put guys off, but now I realise, who cares?
For many years, it seemed as if nothing changed in Norway. You could leave the country for three months, travel the world, through coups d'etat, assassinations, famines, massacres and tsunamis, and come home to find that the only new thing in the newspapers was the crossword puzzle.
The law seemed to be always what I came back to. I have never, one day in my life as a lawyer, regretted my decision to become a lawyer.
By the time I grew up, acting just seemed like something I'd already done. I had absolutely no interest in it, even though some people thought it would be my calling.
It just seemed hedonistic when I first started acting. It was a pleasurable thing. But as I look back on it now, I understand that it was a journey of the self for me.
I think in the '70s that there was a general feeling of chaos, a feeling that the idea of the '60s as 'ideal' was a misnomer. Nothing seemed ideal anymore. Everything seemed in-between.
I had tried writing novels for many years, and they always escaped me. For a long time, I thought, 'It's just not in me to write a novel. It's not something I'm able to do.' It seemed like everything I wrote naturally ended at the bottom of page three. A picture book, three pages; an essay, three pages.
I think when people talk about ambition and talking to him, it might have seemed that he wasn't ambitious.
A newspaperman said, 'You have to have a team in New York.' I replied, 'Who says you have to have a team in New York?' What came out in the papers was a headline that said, Giles Says, 'Who needs New York?' I confess that quote bothered me, and there seemed to be no way to dispose of it. It was repeated again and again.
So many features at Sundance seemed to be powered more on the director's need to be a director than any particular story.
This image of wanting to be an artist - that I would in some way become an artist -was very strong. I knew for a long, long time that that's what I would be. But nothing I ever did seemed to bring me any nearer to the condition of being an artist. And I didn't know how to do it.
I started training with school friends and, one by one, they all dropped out. When we became teenagers, it seemed more exciting to go shopping at weekends. My mum told me not to worry about what my friends were doing and to stick at it.
Like many other people of my generation, I don't think I ever really bothered to grow up. I wasn't ever really a proper teenager until I was about 19, and maybe I got a bit stuck there, because it seemed to go on and on.
My chemistry teacher wanted me to do chemistry, and my art teacher wanted me to do art. Fashion seemed like a good in-between - using your brain but being creative.
The '80s was the time for the great so-called modernization in Spain. It was a moment when it seemed that everything was breaking up and moving fast into modernity.
It seemed to me to be entirely un-kosher, if that's a word, to try to put a debate about war right in front of the midterm to try to affect the midterm outcomes.
First, I'd become an avid reader of blogs, especially music blogs, and they seemed to be where the critical-thinking action was at, to have the kind of energy that I associate with rock writing of the 1970s or Internet e-mail discussion lists a decade ago.
I was in a band at school, and almost from the day we started, I started writing songs, just because that seemed what you did.
I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.
I still held fast to my determination to become a minister; it still seemed to me that that was my duty. I had pledged myself, in my prayers I had given my word to God. How could I therefore break my vow?
The thing with Berry and Duane and the rest of us in the original Allman Brothers seemed to be a once-in-a-lifetime thing. When Duane was killed, we knew we lost a great part of that, but we still managed to play some great music.
I loved the movies and I wanted to be like Marilyn Monroe. I thought she was so glamorous and everyone seemed to love her. I wanted to be like that and I told everyone I would be the next Marilyn Monroe.
By the 2010s, almost everybody in the developed world, it seemed, had a powerful digital device that took little or no special skills or training to use.
'Sunrise Sunset' is a letter I wrote to a girl I was once with who I really thought I was going to fall in love with. We tried to make it work but always had trouble maintaining a real relationship because we were both so caught up with work, life, and everything else that at the time seemed like it was the priority.
I read somewhere that Mitt and I have a 'storybook marriage.' Well, in the storybooks I read, there were never long, long, rainy winter afternoons in a house with five boys screaming at once. And those storybooks never seemed to have chapters called MS or breast cancer.
'Alligator' was the first record that anyone paid attention to, and it seemed like it was the screamy songs that got us that attention.
While I knew that individuals had in history - and still could - make a difference, it seemed presumptuous - even pompous - to imagine that I could be part of it, that I could be one of them.
My sisters used to learn dance, and I used to stand behind them and dance. So my guruji suggested that I also learn, as I seemed interested. I started learning at the age of three and was always on stage for something or the other. My mother is proud of me, and clearly my artistic bent comes from her.
I picked economics at the end of my undergraduate time because it seemed to be a really nice combination of theory, including mathematical theory on one hand, and things that are quite practical that you can touch and see and feel. So I picked it, and I consciously thought of it as an experiment to see if I liked it. And it worked.
My desire for my own sitcom began as a little girl - I spent hours lying on my belly on the shag carpeting getting lost in the world of the '70s sitcom. All I wanted to do was run away to the Brady house, The Partridge Family bus; even the project on 'Good Times' seemed better than Clark, NJ.
I went into acting because I'm easily bored. Acting seemed to give vent to a lot of different feelings.
