The whole point of a sacrifice is that you give up something you never really wanted in the first place. People are doing it around you all the time. They give up their careers, say - or their beliefs - or sex.
I did nothing but theater until, I guess, '99. I was all the way through college the first time that I had stepped in front of a camera. And it's weird; it's definitely a transition.
We've got to decide, how much replay do we want? Because if you start doing it from the first inning to the ninth inning, you may have to time the game with a calendar.
I was counsel on the full veterans committee, the first Vietnam veteran to serve as a full-committee counsel in Congress. It stunned me that there was a 600,000-case backlog of claims. During my time in the Senate, it became 900,000.
By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn't need pen or paper - my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape.
My stepdad is Bruce Jenner, the Olympian. The first time he came over was like a blind date, and we had show and tell. He took out the gold medal for me and my sisters, and we were like, 'So? Who the hell are you?'
I was fascinated by the culture clash between England and America in the 1950s. My first memories are of being a girl in those post-war years when things were really pretty grim. It wasn't like that in America, which was real boom time.
The period after the First World War was an extremely different time, so that Sherlock Holmes would have been a different person following 1918 than he was during the Victorian era.
Teaching was my first job after leaving university. It was a challenge, but I enjoyed it. Some of the kids were disruptive, but I could deal with it because I was only 24 at the time, and my own school memories were still fresh.
I made that first record in 2008, alongside the EP, but my label at the time waited three years to release it. They thought maybe someone bigger would buy it, but they didn't, so in the end they just released it themselves.
But when I came back into the city for the first time last November, I thought every truck, every building was going to blow up. It has truly changed me something fierce.
I came from the musical stage. My first show was '110 In The Shade.' I started as a ballet dancer and then sort of gravitated toward musical theater, so any time I got asked to sing or dance, it was a joy for me.
First thing, I throw on some jeans, a T-shirt and my Keds sneakers and make coffee. That is actually my favorite time of day. That is when I do my songwriting, when I am in writing mode.
Usually, if you have a new idea, you very rarely break through to anything like recognizable development or implementation of that idea the first time around - it takes two or three goes for the research community to return to the topic.
When The Simpsons came around, there really was nothing else like it on TV. It's hard to imagine, but when Fox first took the plunge with it, it was considered controversial to put animation on prime time.
In the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the first attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of nati...
We all get a little rush of excitement at the prospect of buying a brand-new outfit for a first date, but this is not the time. You're much better off wearing clothes, shoes especially, that you've already tested.
The first thing that is not obvious to people is global warming is a less-than-1% effect. It's like being shortchanged at the bank by a penny every dollar. Over a long period of time with lots of transactions, that piles up.
My first collection was made from sheets that my grandmother, who lived in Normandy, had been collecting for a long time. There are a lot of flea markets in that part of France, and she knew what I liked.
The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.
When I was young I was one of the second generation of black people in Holland. My father was the first. My mother was white, and living with a black man at that time and having a how-you-say half-caste boy is not easy.
