While some of my closest friends were jocks, it seemed that they spoke a different language with each other. Joining in their conversation was fraught with risk.
It seemed to me that I had barely reached the Court when people were trying to get me off.
I was living in New York City and flat broke. My next door neighbor was an actor and he always seemed to be having more fun than I was. He convinced me to give acting a shot, but because of my shyness I was sure it would be a lost cause.
Man, it seemed, had been created to jab the life out of Germans.
I always felt that sci-fi and fantasy were my thing. Bit of a geek, I'm afraid. But I like creating worlds, and I felt it was a genre that gave me more freedom. It just seemed like I belonged there.
It seemed like my favourite kind of job - a wonderful chance to ask something absolutely fundamental: the fate of the Universe and whether the Universe was infinite or not.
I was always different from all the other kids, and I was doing things that nobody else did or seemed to have any interest in.
There are men and women still on the streets, and that's all they are saying Can you spare a quarter? I come from a crowd of people who were current on the outlook on life, who were social and knew where they were and had some input into how things seemed to be.
It was a romantic dream to be a writer. It seemed like a calling.
Well I think that's probably one of a few, where I grew up in the City of New York, it's got a lot of energy, my parents are Irish-American so there was a bit of yelling going on in my house but it seemed normal.
Well, I was passionately curious about what my body was doing, and when I got the lessons on how to meditate, it seemed really solid to me. It seemed real.
I've always made a total effort, even when the odds seemed entirely against me. I never quit trying; I never felt that I didn't have a chance to win.
The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.
It's always good to get a goal on your first shift, but this was a game it seemed everything was going in.
Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby, and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since.
And the camera position, the organization, looking for repeating forms, shapes, trying to set up a visual rhythm seemed to come very natural. All of a sudden I was in a forest of aluminum and steel rather than a forest that we might think of in a traditional sense.
It's inevitable that if you do okay on something like that you don't just annoy people, that it will make a difference because it seemed like such a lot of people so, yes I would have to say that it has done.
Going to New York to do whatever - show business - it just seemed fun. It seemed fun to go to the big city and meet all kinds of different people and maybe be famous. It was just exciting. So I wasn't scared.
When we were doing a scene, lots of times we would collapse giggling, because it seemed so silly because it felt like we were doing a home movie at times.
When I was starting out, I followed along the path that seemed to be marked out for me - from high school to college to law school to professional life.
Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with.
I liked Latin, I like languages, I liked all the myths, and the Roman tales that we were required to translate in Latin, and all these interesting people who were never quite what they thought they would be or seemed to be.
In a way I guess I'd be a bad judge of what it was like because it just seemed perfectly normal to me.
It was the '50s, and the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal System were in fashion. I hung out in the 812 section - American theater and plays. This is where I first read Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' and was transfixed. I remember staring into space for what seemed an eternity after reading Linda Loman's final speech.
I just remember how cool and exciting and crazy it seemed when Marvel was giving this new 'Ultimate Spider-Man' title to this crime writer Brian Michael Bendis who had never really done any superhero stuff before.
Yes, now I understood for the first time that my soul was not so poor and empty as it had seemed to me, and that it had been only the sun that was lacking to open all its germs, and buds to the light.
I worked with Steven Spielberg on Amistad... he seemed so very secure in himself that he let me do things.
I was constantly being told I shouldn't talk so much about how I was feeling. They seemed to think I was giving too much away to my competitors. Showing signs of weakness. But I've always thought that was rubbish.
When I was younger, I talked to the adults around me that I respected most about how they got where they were, and none of them plotted a course they could have predicted, so it seemed a waste of time to plan too long-term. Since then, I've always gone on my instincts.
Criticism always seemed to me a lot like police work. You look for clues, fingerprints, motives. You need to construct an airtight case.
A lot of the futuristic space stuff seemed to me to be a very cool form of science-fiction, so that was my first real baptism in the genre.
Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon.
People in the world can never imagine the length of days to those in asylums. They seemed never ending, and we welcomed any event that might give us something to think about as well as talk of.
The role seemed to demand that I keep myself worked up to fever pitch, so I took on the actual attributes of the horrible vampire, Dracula.
I always admired Walt's optimism. He seemed to know the direction he was going to. When I was at the studio, I remember he kept driving all of us back down to a more fundamental level all the time.
Frankly, I have always dreaded writing - there always seemed to be pain involved, unpleasant self-examination and a lot of fear.
