I have high hopes for Renee Ballard's literary life, and it can't start out better than the top of 'USA TODAY''s best-seller list.
My star will probably continue to rise, and I will start hanging out with Beyonce and Jay-Z and take them to a Toby Carvery.
I grew up mostly with classical, big band, and a lot of Irish music - I really didn't start listening to rock and roll until I was maybe sixteen.
When people start to perceive you as the big guy, you're not allowed to be scrappy, fierce.
The minute I get a big head and start acting like the big man on campus, it's all downhill from there.
My biggest influence is Tupac. He was a poet, and listening to Tupac is what inspired me to start rapping.
My parents are overweight, and I think the biggest problem we have in America is a lack of education. The place to start is with parents and teaching them to cook healthier.
If Congress wants to mess with the retirement program, why don't we let them start by changing their retirement program, and not have one, instead of talking about getting rid of Social Security and Medicare that was robbed $700 billion dollars to pay for Obamacare.
If you're trying to develop a new drug, that costs you a billion dollars to get through the FDA. If you want to start a software company, you can get started with maybe $100,000.
It's more common than not that bipolar illness will start in the teens. One of the reasons I spend a lot of time on college campuses is exactly that reason. It's terribly important to talk to students about knowing these things in advance.
Learning music is a birthright. And you have to start young.
I keep threatening to keep a formal journal, but whenever I start one it instantly becomes an exercise in self-consciousness. Instead of a journal I manage to have dozens of notebooks with bits and pieces of stories, poems, and notes. Almost every thing I do has its beginning in a notebook of some sort, usually written on a bus or train.
If Mother Theresa went to Atlantic City, I don't think she'd start playing Blackjack.
It's a marvellous life, a gregarious life that we've had. We're very lucky in that way. Unlike writers or painters, we don't sit down in front of a blank canvas and say, 'How do I start? Where do I start?'
I have a horror of the blank page. I simply cannot write on a blank page or screen. Because once I do, I start to fix it, and I never get past the first sentence.
The key thing is that you start every film from sort of a blank page, almost like you discover it like a child discovers a new world.
As African-Americans, we don't start with a blank slate, while other people may. In our position, there's always some sort of stereotype that is being scrutinized or that is being assumed when we come through the curtain.
Whenever I finish a book, I start with a blank slate and never have ideas lined up.
CGI has fully ruined car crashes. Because how can you be impressed with them now? When you watch them in the '70s, it was real cars, real metal, real blasts. They're really doing it and risking their lives. But I knew CGI was gonna start taking over.
To not have any hope is where things start to get really bleak. Things are possible. The impossible can be possible.
