When I first started submitting my work professionally - and we're talking years and years ago - I had no patience for editorial response times. I hated waiting to hear back from people, hated waiting to see my work in print.
When I started painting 17 years ago, I never imagined that anyone would look at my work or buy my pieces. But now I do about 14 exhibitions each year.
Former Dublin newsman Paul Lynch made his debut as a novelist a few years ago with a book called 'Red Sky in Morning,' set in mid-19th century County Donegal, where a rage-driven farmer has committed a murder with devastating results.
A few years ago, I thought, I'll never make it. I started to go to the doctor to help me lose weight.
I lost the accent years ago, but I'm still very proud to be Scottish, and I love wearing a kilt.
I think that the continuity of what I do as an editor with what I did when I started out 40 years ago is very direct. The delivery system is changing and will continue to, but the actual interaction between publisher and author is exactly the same.
Years ago, when I was in Siena for the first time, I saw the works of Duccio, whose deeply emotional painting from the thirteenth century has never left me.
When, over fifty years ago, I first became interested in economics - as a discipline that provided the key to social structure and social problems - it never crossed my mind that one day I might be the honored recipient of a Nobel Memorial Prize.
Just because someone's dead doesn't mean it's over. My grandfather died more than 25 years ago, but I still think of him a lot and smell his smell.
I got out of the music industry many years ago. I had a charlatan for a producer who I wanted nothing to do with. He's dead now, so I guess I can't beat that horse any more. It left a very bad taste in my mouth, so I just went on about my business doing what I do and not involving myself with record companies, except for distribution.
I met a guy on the golf course who was a kinesiologist - after I looked up the word, I found out it meant exercise. I started working with him, and that was many years ago.
25, 30 years ago, that meant something, they were making some money. And they were doing all sorts of comedy, screaming at the audience, basically crowd control. And then there was the whole urban comedy scene.
I'm generally known as a happy person, but years ago, I suffered from panic and anxiety. I've learned to manage the fear and pain.
I will not play just an evil part. In fact, I got offered $7 million several years ago to play the part that Faye Dunaway played in 'Supergirl.' I was kind of insulted. I was impressed with the money, but I said, 'Why are you asking me to play an evil witch? Do I come across as an evil witch to you?'
Motorsport is very expensive. No one cares if you had a good season two years ago and then you have an injury. It is a very dodgy investment.
Human exploration is something that's been going on for thousands of years, and the models that worked 500 years ago are likely to work again today.
Many years ago, I think I got my first insight on how an incredibly diverse team can work together and do astonishing things, and not just misunderstand each other and fight.
I lived in Paris when I was 20 and 21, and actually knew people that worked for the government there, that talked about terrorism in the country 20 years ago.
But inspiration? - That's when you come home from abroad and are asked: Well, have you found inspiration? - and fortunately you haven't. But the impressions sink in, of course, and may emerge later: None of us has invented the house; that was done many thousands of years ago.
My younger sister retired a few years ago after a 30-year career teaching history and social studies at an inner-city high school.
For instance, it's a little better now than it was two or three years ago, but something like 70% of the poems I receive seem to be written in the present indicative.
We regard those other cultures, such as that of India, where many people live and believe and behave much as they did 1,000 or 2,000 years ago, as undeveloped.
I was shooting for a Telugu film at the Taj Mahal in Agra, and there were all these women and children pointing and screaming, 'Rowdy Rathore.' But I am not really 'Rowdy Rathore.' I am the guy who did the original version of 'Rowdy Rathore' six years ago.
I am a divorced child, of divided, uncertain background. Within this division I - supposed fruit of their love - no longer exist. It happened nearly forty years ago, yet to me, nothing is sadder than my parents' divorce.
Twenty years ago my parents wouldn't know who the X-Men were, and now everybody knows that stuff. It means that deconstruction of the superhero is something you can do. All those movies have led to a point where we can finally have 'Watchmen' with a Superman character who doesn't want to save the world and a Batman who has trouble in bed.
When hired three years ago, I willingly accepted the challenge of leading the Bulls back to the type of team this city richly deserves. I'm proud of the fact that each year the team has taken another step toward an NBA championship, and played with intense pride and determination.
My dad spent most of the '50s and early '60s actually acting as sort of an advance man for the Justice Department, as a civil rights lawyer. So it was actually reading his papers after he passed away a few years ago that first started me thinking about this... What fraction of your life do you spend in service to your fellow man?
Hundreds of years ago, the most beautiful women of Havana were only glimpsed stepping in or out of carriages on this street. The first foreign writers who arrived and saw this could never get past just how incredibly beautiful their feet were.
Years ago, the writers were telling me that I'd make the Hall of Fame, so I kind of prepared a speech. But somewhere along in the 28 years, it got lost.
Almost 63 years ago, my father, John Johnson, named the publication 'Jet' because, as he said in the first issue, 'In the world today, everything is moving faster. There is more news and far less time to read it.' He could not have spoken truer words. We are not saying goodbye to 'Jet'; we are embracing the future as my father did in 1951.
I can see that if this was an album done 10 or 15 years ago we could see we were moving on to some place else.
Ten years ago, TV cookery shows were about a man or a woman following recipes. Now, it's all about journeys and campaigns and less about the actual chopping and dicing. That's what I'd like to do with magic.
If I wanted to be a pop singer, I would have done that 20 years ago. I love country music.
There's been resistance to every new technology that's ever been introduced. When books came out hundreds of years ago, there were complaints that it would destroy the oral tradition. Some of those fears were justified, but it didn't stop the rise of the written word. And books have proven to be incredibly useful.
The pharma industry is one of the few industries that comes up every year and brags about how much worse they got - like, now it costs $2 billion to make a drug, and it was a billion 5 years ago.
I think if I'd quit years ago, I'd never have known what I was capable of doing.
