'iCarly' was one of my first major jobs, actually. I went into that audition and completely failed at it. I completely bombed... I forgot my lines. When I forget my lines, I kind of get angry. They had me do it again; I remembered them, and I booked ...
When I first went to Las Vegas, I thought I would never go to Las Vegas; you can't get anything. But then I realized that they were trucking in almost everything; you could get a lot of your product, and I think that's why a lot of chefs actually wen...
You never forget the books you loved as a kid. You never forget the poems you memorized, the first book you read until the cover fell off, the book you read hidden from your mother. What an honor to hold hands with a child's imagination in this way.
Wherever I go, people ask: 'What is she? What is she?' There has always been an agenda - they're excluding me or including me in something with that question. It is the first thing agents in Los Angeles ask me. And then I'd hear: 'You're not black en...
It's a well-known fact that the TV camera adds 10 pounds. I don't want to say that I've been calling my Jenny Craig consultant a lot, but I'm pretty sure I'm the first spokesperson whom they've considered filing a restraining order against.
There are two industry secrets to surviving a long day on camera on the red carpet: First, no drinking the night before - ever. You can celebrate after with some bubbly. Second is make sure to use shoe insoles. I don't care if you are a guy or a girl...
In late 1949, at two and a half years old, I arrived in Jamaica for the first time. I had crossed the Atlantic by air from England. My Jamaican father was studying in London, my European mother was sick, and so in true Jamaican style I was sent home ...
Presidents are always also storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies. And surprisingly enough, Richard Nixon, this awkward man who didn't even really like people, had not been so bad at this duty - at least in the first four years of his...
We're presently in the midst of a third intellectual revolution. The first came with Newton: the planets obey physical laws. The second came with Darwin: biology obeys genetic laws. In today’s third revolution, were coming to realize that even mind...
The weirdest I've felt was my first job ever. It was an editorial in London. They made me take my underwear off and cover myself with a shower curtain. It was almost see-through, so I was like, 'What's this all about?' I used to be quite shy, but mod...
I had someone correct my grammar once on a blind date, and within the first 10 minutes the date was over. You just don't correct somebody's grammar. That's just not okay. I'm from Tennessee, so I probably say everything wrong. I might have said 'ain'...
About 3 million IVF babies have been born since Louise Brown's birth in 1978. Bizarrely, when this life-giving treatment was first considered, it was massively controversial. A storm of vitriolic protest came from many religious leaders, journalists,...
I like that 'Pitch Perfect' is one of my first forays into film and just being seen in that kind of light, aside from some people who know me from 'Spring Awakening' or the other things that I've done. I think in so many ways it's kind of like my own...
It's never me saying, 'When is my day over?' It's more, 'When do they legally have to get me off of the lot, based on when I have to be back the next day?' The first call is a big thing in the acting world and in the union world. There needs to be a ...
Shellac was asked to do a recreation of our first album, but we've always been a band that improvised our sets. That's critical to the way that we function on stage. Whatever the mood takes us on stage can vary from night to night with what you feel ...
Obviously we had to study Shakespeare at school, but to be honest, I was not a fan. I found the language very difficult, and I didn't enjoy watching it or studying it. I auditioned five times for the Royal Shakespeare Company early on in my career, a...
Like so many Boomers, I saw 'Lawrence of Arabia' in 1962 when it was first released and when we were young teenagers. I'm not quite sure why - I really wish some psychologist would explain this - but that movie had a tremendous effect on many of us.
I studied calculus for the first time, which to me was an amazingly empowering experience which I could really see how you could understand all sorts of things, and I decided that chemistry and biology just had too much memory for me to be interested...
Until the Nineteen-Eighties, when Deng Xiaoping designated the area as China's first special economic zone, Shenzhen had been a tiny fishing village. Suddenly, eleven million people appeared, seemingly out of nowhere; factories sprang up, often house...
Let us be sure that the lady of our choice possesses certain tangible qualities that we admire; and if in other ways she falls short of our ideal, we must be patient and call to mind those qualities that first induced us to begin our courting.
The first day I walked into prison, and he slammed that door, I knew the magnitude of the decision that I made, and the poor judgment, and what I allowed to happen to the animals. And, you know, it's no way of explaining the hurt and the guilt that I...
