I remember my first meeting with my management team when I became Indonesia's Minister of Finance. I was the youngest person and the first woman ever to hold that job. Everybody else in the room was male. I knew then that I had to work harder than any man to prove to them that I was capable.
It's only in relatively recent years that Hollywood became the playground of multinational corporations which regard movies and TV shows as a minor irritant to their overall activity.
I'm coaching 'swing at this, don't swing at that,' and in the middle of it, a kid looks at me and says, 'Coach, I think I'm going to fail history.' Or maybe their girlfriend just dumped them. These are kids, and once I embraced that, this became a lot more fun.
When I was in the fourth grade, I became intensely interested in geography and I learned it well.
I think the leotard for me became, after I retired, a sort of a symbol of the confines of still fitting into the ballet world in mind and body.
When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson.
I actually became a producer because I saw the producers getting all the babes. They were stealing them from the guitarists.
I began to pick apart our knowledge of Frankenstein and discovered that the public's idea of this myth comes from a million different places... I became committed to recontextualizing it all so it all worked in one story.
There was a time when meanings were focused and reality could be fixed; when that sort of belief disappeared, things became uncertain and open to interpretation.
I wrote my first novel and my second novel in Chicago. It was the place where I became a writer. It's my favorite city.
The real story of the Ground Zero mosque is that the project only became feasible because of the appalling and astonishing fecklessness of the officials who were charged with the reconstruction of the site and the neighborhood all the way back in 2001.
I became a better listener than I ever had been as a result of playing Jean Luc Picard because it was one of the things that he does terrifically well.
In the 2000s, I became an artist. I started preserving and educating. I became more obsessed with making iPod playlists for people.
During the development of the whole-body CT scanner, it became clear that the availability of an accurate cross-sectional picture of the body, the CT 'slice,' would have an important effect on the precision and implementation of radiotherapy treatment planning.
As a young boy, I read 'Cheaper by the Dozen' and immediately became neurotic about my use of time. It taxed me severely, but only for the next 50 years. But I think it also allowed me to discipline myself to sit in the chair and be a writer, where one of the most needed qualities is patience.
After it became clear that I was not going to graduate, I had this moment where I was like, 'I need to not sulk. I need to pursue - at least try - to pursue music. But if I don't try, I'm going to be a really bitter middle-aged lady working in a cubicle.'
Many of the architects of the Vietnam War became near pariahs as they spent the remainder of their lives in the futile quest to explain away their decisions at the time.
If I were running against Chuck Schumer. I would take every one of his Sunday press releases - and there are 52 for as many years as he's been there - and I would ask, 'How many of the things he said he was proposing became law?' I doubt many.
I was a quarterback in college. I hoped to go to the NFL, and I didn't get drafted. I then became a free agent. I could sign with whoever I wanted to, and I ended up going to Pittsburgh.
The Middle East is a land of great injustice. The Israelis can claim - or wish to, at least - that Lord Balfour's Declaration of 1917 promised Britain support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which didn't just mean the left-hand bit that became Israel.
Some people have heard of The Method, which originally goes back to Stanislavski... he gave you six major pointers whereby you became that character and tried to fool your mind psychologically. That's it in a nutshell. Daniel Day Lewis is an example of somebody like that who stays in character between takes.
Israel will not and should not leave until it is clear that the West Bank can be policed by Palestinians and that the region will not be a source of terrorism against Israel, as Gaza and South Lebanon became when Israel left there.
When I read Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as a freshman at Rutgers, it all clicked - that writing was all I wanted to do. It became my calling.
The United States of America became the envy of the world because we welcomed the best and brightest minds from anywhere on the planet and gave them the opportunity to succeed.
At the age of 12, my parents gave me a chemistry set for Christmas, and experimentation soon became a consuming passion in my life.
The heroes of my childhood were Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy... but I was inspired by the ideals of our 40th president and became a Republican.
I was lousy in school. Real screwed-up. A moron. I was antisocial and didn't bother with the other kids. A really bad student. I didn't have any brains. I didn't know what I was doing there. That's why I became an actor.
As the craft re-entered earth's atmosphere, it was coming in so fast, it heated up the surrounding atoms and molecules, and they became positively and negatively charged, and highly reactive, and began luminescing all around us.
Yeah I grew up in the public eye. I became a man in the public eye, which is kind of a bizarre thing to come to terms with. Now I'm in my late 20s and I was in my early 20s when I became recognizable. But I think 'Moneyball' represents a very strong shift in my career and becoming an adult and a man.
I became a journalist at 17. A few hours later, I saw my first dead body, which was somewhat... colourful. That's when I learned you can go on throwing up after you run out of things to throw up.
How can finite man commune with an infinite God? To both Christians and Jews, God himself has made that possible by irrupting into the temporal world. To Christians, God became man in the Incarnation; to Jews, the God that spoke out of the fire on Mount Sinai gave his Torah.
I became an academic so that I could share my knowledge and experience with students.
I never intended for the Monster Ball to be a religious experience, it just became one.
I did work in a strip club, but I didn't strip. I danced, and I became very popular.
I became a playwright and screenwriter. Italian-Americans were my particular specialty. I liked the way they talked. There was something free in it.
The men I idolized built their bodies and became somebody - like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger - and I thought, 'That can be me.' So I started working out. The funny thing is I didn't realize back then that I was having a defining moment.
