I was pleasantly disappointed on entering Bohemia. Instead of a dull, uninteresting country, as I expected, it is a land full of the most lovely scenery. There is every thing which can gratify the eye - high blue mountains, valleys of the sweetest pastoral look and romantic old ruins.

Commercials certainly pay more than films. I was pleasantly surprised at the profitability of commercials when I did my first ad for a popular soap brand years ago. I was paid a huge amount of money for a mere 30 seconds of screen presence. After that, ads have been a regular feature in my career.

I've been really pleasantly surprised by 'Guardians of the Galaxy.' I'd never really heard of that gang before, that comic series before. And I think when you go into those, watching those sort of films, you watch them with no expectation as well, so you're always kind of pleasantly surprised, I think.

Octavia Spencer rocks. But just as a human being, she's so down-to-earth. Talk about being pleasantly surprised. You walk onto set, and she's making these jokes, and she's playing around with the cast and the crew, and she invited all to her house for a dinner party. She's just a genuinely good person.

Thank God, I have sort of a pan-European accent rather than Russian, which doesn't sound very pleasantly to Americans. For them, we speak with a rather rude pitch, and that might be our actors' problem there. Now I've begun working with language coaches in Los Angeles to get rid of the accent completely.

I was pleasantly surprised with 'Salvage.' I went to Australia and New Zealand for the novel and met a lot of people who had experienced the earthquakes in Christchurch. They responded very strongly to the book because they had been through these natural disasters and were trying to figure out how to rebuild.

I was actually quite surprised how many more mythologies there are about mermaids than the ones our society knows. I was so pleasantly surprised for 'Siren' to add quite an original idea to that: One that is a predator. One that is very intelligent but still has to survive in the ocean with all of its challenges.

I lived at the Gramercy Park Hotel for about 10 years. It was terrific. It was a pleasantly run-down hotel of the '70s and '80s with a mix of older, rent-controlled apartment dwellers, Europeans and new wave and punk bands. The room service was great, the hamburger was terrific, and they had a doctor who made house calls.

Our thoughts about an event can have a dramatic effect on how we go through the event itself. When our expectations are low, it's easy to be pleasantly surprised. When they're not, we're vulnerable to painful disappointment. Because of this, many people spend a good deal of effort trying to avoid developing high hopes about anything.

I was a little hesitant at first because there's so many ways you can get 'Straight Outta Compton' wrong. You know, it's such a great story; it's such a classic tale. I was a little nervous 'cause it's like a very narrow road to success with that type of story - you got to get it right - but when I read it, I was pleasantly surprised.

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