I was definitely living fast. I was working, traveling a lot, playing. I didn't stop. It all became unbalanced.
I was socially isolated as a kid. I had friends, but I wasn't very good at sports and that sort of thing so I became quite comfortable being by myself, exploring. The world was my private playground, and in it, I was supreme. Darwin, Faraday, Huxley and other great scientists were my companions.
An agent saw one of the plays I did at ACT, but my mom was like, No, she's too young. I became so annoying that a year and a half later she just couldn't stand hearing me any more!
I didn't really want to be a teacher, but there was nothing else I could be. Most of those who went to the university became teachers. It was just the racial restriction on Africans.
It's interesting to try to imagine how early humans discovered what was edible and what wasn't. Who figured out that when you cooked stinging nettles, the sting would go away completely? How many people had to die before the relative toxicity of wild mushrooms became widely known?
I started taekwondo at 5 or 6 years old and did a bunch of kick-boxing later, too. Eventually I became a black belt and coached as well. I did some basketball and softball growing up, but most of my activity was martial arts.
For me, and maybe for many religious kids of the '60s, the church lost relevance the more it became a surrogate in the movement for social and political change.
White men have always controlled their wives' wages. Colored men were not able to do so until they themselves became free. Then they owned both their wives and their wages.
I had a house in Haiti, in the hills above the North Atlantic coast. The house appeared as if out of a dream: my dream to have a foothold in the country. Like many concepts do in Haiti, the phrase 'pied a terre' became literal, material.
As I read more and I got into philosophy and met a lot of friends who weren't Christians, it became difficult for me to sustain the belief structure in the supernatural.
They fired director Richard Donner because they didn't want to pay him, and he's the reason the franchise became so successful in the first place. There's a big part of Superman II that he did that no one has ever seen.
Dick Moss, my agent. Dick became my agent in 1979 when I signed my contract with the Houston Astros.
Back in '93 I saw my first UFC fight and just became enamored by it then.
When I began to think about the head of the family, the storyteller, the rise of television which became the new storyteller, the break-up of the American family as an idea and then Avalon came.
You think back and you ask yourself why you became so interested in wolves. I think it was because when I was very small, growing up in a little hamlet near Shap, we would go to Lowther Wildlife Park for birthday parties. Now closed, it was only three miles from my parents' house.
I got into the Shanghai Drama Institute because my parents, like all parents, want their children to have good grades and to go to a good college. I became a college student because of them.
My dad was in the army. World War II. He got his college education from the army. After World War II he became an insurance salesman. Really, I didn't know my dad very well. He and my mother split up after the war. I was raised by my maternal grandmother and grandfather, and by my mother.
I became an ardent, but never a specially good, dancer.
You know, one of the perceptions, again, about FEMA is that there's been a demise in the organization since it became the - under - it started to become part of the Department of Homeland Security.
Both my brothers became physicians and I, of course, wandered into a business where the undisciplined are welcome.
I think The 'Cheetah Girls' was originally supposed to be one film, but then it became two and three, which was a huge deal. But like all Disney franchises, they have to come to an end at some point. I was so grateful we went out with a bang. I think we died off peacefully.
When Thurgood Marshall became a lawyer, race relations in the United States were particularly bad.
I think I was immediately fed, so food became a very important part of my life.
I became a Christian late, in my late 30s, so I had a lot of things that I was bringing into my Christian life that I regret. And I had a lot of questions about faith, so that's where I start when I write.
As the writer of a pseudonymous book, I gave up my own accumulated history as a novelist and became what I had been as a child: unnamed, unidentified, unacknowledged. Invisible. In a very real sense, what I hope for in the process of imagining a book is to disappear.
In the summer of 1966, I went to Mississippi to be in the heart of the civil-rights movement, helping people who had been thrown off the farms or taken off the welfare roles for registering to vote. While working there, I met the civil-rights lawyer I later married - we became an interracial couple.
I made an enjoyable living as a very young man, but I think as I became more comfortable and knowledgeable about myself and what I wanted, I moved into acting.
The drawing of a 'Pipeline Wave' started with Billabong as a commission for their 2009 Pipeline Masters campaign. My 'Pipeline Wave' drawing later became the start of my 'Waterworks Collection' for gallery prints.
All of this suggests that while citizens became more comfortable with President Bush after September 11 and thought him to have the requisite leadership skills, they continue to harbor doubts about his priorities, loyalties, interests, and policies.
Muhammad Ali is a combination of personality and athlete who is probably better known around the world than any other. He became a great hero.
We had our first earthquake over here recently. That was a bizarre feeling. I just became disoriented and I remember my dad freaking out. Nothing broke or anything.
I found it quite pleasing to be alone from a very young age. The piano became my source of release.
Johnny Mercer started Capitol Records, and he brought in Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Nat King Cole. He just let them sing whatever they wanted, and it became the best record company in America.
For me, the interesting thing about anorexia is that you show your wound. There's no hiding it. So my anger and sense of disappointment, all the stuff I was out of touch with, became this visible rebuke to my parents.
I had higher math SATs than in English - yet I became an English major in college.
My mother, who was quite sharp when I was young, became utterly mild.
