Outside of my family, I was always inspired by true heroic stories of leadership and survival. For example, the story of the Shackleton expedition, when their ship became lodged in the Antarctic ice pack while exploring.

My tendency as an actor was to correct people, was to say, 'What if we tried it this way, what about if we tried that way?' That's terrible habit for an actor, but that's a good habit for director. So I became a director.

Music from my fourth year began to be the first of my youthful occupations. Thus early acquainted with the gracious muse who tuned my soul to pure harmonies, I became fond of her, and, as it often seemed to me, she of me.

I'm vegan, though not completely religious about it. While writing 'Sapiens,' I became familiar with how we treat animals in the meat and dairy industries. I was so horrified that I didn't want to be a part of it anymore.

I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.

I was a cop in the Las Vegas Police Department in 1957. I was very young when I joined. But then I became a federal narcotics agent after that, in Vegas, and that propelled me into my future to fight the drug traffickers.

Without the Fender bass, there'd be no rock n' roll or no Motown. The electric guitar had been waiting 'round since 1939 for a nice partner to come along. It became an electric rhythm section, and that changed everything.

In 1971, I put together the 'Johnny Face' drawing as a concept, with the words as part of an image in a circle. Combining my abstract drawing with the headline 'Crazy World Ain't It' created an emblem and became a button.

Jatin Khanna and I both changed our names for the silver screen. He became known the world over as Rajesh Khanna and from Ravi Kapoor, I transformed into Jeetendra! A little known fact is that we were also school friends.

When I moved out here to California, I became obsessed with geology. It's impossible not to be interested in the earth if you live in a place like this. I started to read a lot of geology, much to the horror of my friends.

I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth.

Being chronically shy I needed to create a persona for myself and be involved with a band where I could be ruler of my own kingdom. Then Pulp became hugely popular and I lost control of it, which is when it all went wrong.

I first became aware of the delights of the natural world when my father, an entomologist, presented me with what looked like a twig. When it got up and walked, my delight was such that I wrote a poem, 'To a Walking Stick.'

It was what became something of a pattern in the first couple of years of the Clinton White House and maybe even longer, where information would drip, drip, drip, drip, drip out which would keep stories alive, alive, alive.

We were romantics in the 1990s and thought that communism was dead. But 10 years passed, and Putin came, and it became obvious that the process is reversible; that communism will, to varying degrees, return again and again.

Coming back to Delhi is always special. This is the place I'd started my journey from and became independent. Be it my career or my education, I learnt everything about life from this city, and it has made me who I am today.

I was a super-duper Tupac fan, and I realized later, when I became a huge Nas fan and a huge Eminem fan, I was drawn to the storytellers. They all told stories in different ways, but they were all like the best storytellers.

I did some acting in college. But then everything stopped when I was a junior, in the fall of 2001, when I started becoming religious. Once I became a full-on Hasidic, I stopped everything. I stopped music. I stopped acting.

The Windrush era is a very important part of British history as it helps us understand how and why we became the multicultural society we are today, and also helps us understand the history of race relations in this country.

Even Colin Powell who was everywhere before he became secretary of state, just stopped going out. I think part of it was he didn't want to be viewed suspiciously by the other people in the White House who rarely go anywhere.

But I was always just having fun and out and about and working, doing whatever. But when I met Vogue is when something went off in my mind and I became a far more serious person. She makes me a much better version of myself.

I think the '60s was a great time for music, especially for rock and roll. It was the era of The Beatles, of The Stones, and then later on The Who and Zeppelin. But at one point in the '70s, it just kind of became... mellow.

In 2009, novelty toymaker Maxfield & Oberton released Buckyballs, sets of curiously powerful magnetic marbles that became the most popular cubicle toy since the Rubik's Cube, selling more than 2 million units in 15 countries.

I always said I was very grateful for Chelsea. I spent an amazing time of my career there, we won a lot of trophies, and I think I became a better player. I have great friends in the club, and I always wish the best for them.

One strategy for getting ahead is being incredibly good at a particular skill; you need to be world-class to stand out for that skill. In my case, I layered fairly average skills together until the combination became special.

I became this dorky 15-year-old, in my bedroom all the time with crossed eyes, staring at my computer. It was all drum loops, R&B and pop - silly songs that I hope to God no one ever hears. But that's what got me in to music.

I became a sales manager at Digital Equipment, promoted from within the sales team. My peers were less than excited that I had gotten the job, especially one of my male peers who said he just wasn't going to work for a woman.

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.

Constantine 'Costa' Gratsos had made his fortune as a lifelong associate of shipping icon Aristotle Onassis. He took a liking to me, became my first mentor, and showed me how to swim in the deep, dangerous waters of business.

The question is not... if art is enough to fulfill my life, but if I am true to the path I have set for myself, if I am the best I can be in the things I do. Am I living up to the reasons I became a singer in the first place?

I started performing in 1950 at the age of 16 when I joined the Burton Lester's Midgets as a performer. Shortly after, I became a DJ with Mecca Organization before joining Billy Smart's Circus as a clown and shadow Ringmaster.

My father, a math professor in Hong Kong, worked as an electrical engineer here. My mother was an art teacher, but once we came to the United States, she went back to school and became certified as a special-education teacher.

'Home Alone' had become the absolute biggest film I had ever done, and it became the third-highest grossing film of all time. So clearly it had an effect on me that is unparalleled to any other film experience in my childhood.

Twelve years ago, when I was on the Pine Ridge Reservation for 'Thunderheart,' I was dong research into Native American horses that had come into extinction. I was tracing certain Lakota bloodlines, and it became an obsession.

'Minecraft' certainly became a huge hit, and people are telling me it's changed games. I never meant for it to do either. It's certainly flattering, and to gradually get thrust into some kind of public spotlight is interesting.

I started writing songs when I was 10. It was a natural way to express myself as a kid. It wasn't until I started listening to jazz, joined the choir and picked up a guitar that my little hobby became something far more serious.

The British ballads became a new kind of form in their hand. And out of them came the blues, a new kind of song of commentary and satire, a song form which, after all, has become the main musical form of the whole human species.

Over the years Woodstock got glorified and romanticised and became the event that symbolised Utopia. It's the last page of our collective memory of the age of innocence. Then things turned ugly and would never be the same again.

I've done movies that I've been advised not to do. 'Dog Soldiers,' the movie I did 11 years ago now, I remember my agent at the time was like, 'You shouldn't do that. It's a weird film about werewolves,' and it became a cult hit.

At the federal level, the fiscal stimulus of 2008 and 2009 supported economic output, but the effects of that stimulus faded; by 2011, federal fiscal policy actions became a drag on output growth when the recovery was still weak.

I became the master of playing the straight bat - I would go to bars with the boys, I would always be the one to start a fight, to be outrageous and drink the most. I even went to the extreme of marrying the perfect woman for me.

Luckily for me, Hereford restarted their youth team. I trained a few times with the first team before my first stroke of luck, when the club's youth team coach Pete Beadle, someone who knew me well, became the first-team manager.

In a clown, we see what we do that makes us laugh and cry. I kept the white face, the tradition of the Pierrot. My clown became a romantic and stylized figure. I wanted to be an abstract and concrete figure, a symbol of humanity.

I am not sure when it became de rigueur for presidential candidates to publish a work between hard covers, but nobody now runs for high office without having written, or having arranged for the ghostwriting of, a very large book.

As soon as television became the only secondary way in which films were watched, films had to adhere to a pretty linear system, whereby you can drift off for ten minutes and go and answer the phone and not really lose your place.

Lyrics became important for a while in the late Seventies. Patti Smith was a poet and a rock star, as much one as the other, the distinctions were a bit blurred and then you get swept up in it. Punk poet, it's a good enough term.

The younger me was motivated by a need to please others, by the pressure to climb the corporate ladder and make money, and by a fear of failure - all of which became more and more intense as I navigated the competitive landscape.

When I began I thought that literature was contained within a bubble that somehow floated above the world commented upon by newspapers. But I became more and more interested in trying to include some of that world within my work.

I became a soldier, not because I had a military vocation initially, but because it was the only way that that young, poor-class child from the provinces could go to the center of the country: through baseball, which was my dream.

Ride It' did it for me. Not only did the Asian community love it, but the black community and the white community got to hear about it. The song became such a big hit for me and got me noticed by the CEOs of Cash Money in America.

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