I knew I wanted to do something creative, and you don’t necessarily go to Harvard to do that. It’s not the best choice for creative writing.

I’m a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I...

It was not really a career choice that I had to make. It was something I knew right from the beginning. I had to be an actress… period.

I was pretty young when I decided I wanted to, well, more so be a singer. I started singing in church in my hometown, East Orange, New Jersey. I knew when I was about five...

I am turning into the person I knew I would.

My parents sent me to a dance class, so it was a road chosen by them, not me. But I enjoyed it so much I knew I would become a performer.

I used to live in the Bronx, then I lived uptown on 106th St. and Broadway, and finally I moved to Harlem right before it became gentrified. I lived on 120th St. between Fifth and...

I always knew I would be successful. So there was no element of surprise.

When I moved to Los Angeles, aged 54, I printed out Winston Churchill’s phrase, ‘Never, never, never give up’, and stuck it on my fridge. I had no idea what was going to happen, but...

Right from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write palpably Scottish fiction.

I could not see myself going back into the studio without Tommy Dowd, our beloved producer who passed away in 2002. Then in 2009, Michael Lehman, my manager, really pushed me to meet with T...

I couldn’t bear it if anyone knew I had hardly any self-confidence at all.

There I am, chain-smoking and watching YouTube videos in my bedroom at 6 A.M. when a spoken-word video comes on the screen. I knew I had to do it: that it was another part of...

I never gave up on country music because I knew what I was doing was not that bad.

The puppet characters were combinations of people I had known and to some degree aspects of my own personality. Weird was based on someone I knew in Chicago. Dirty Dragon was based on a good...

I have my loyalty to the team of my youth. Everyone I knew was a Red Sox fan. The team that I grew up with was constantly the underdog but managed to prevail.

Motherhood to me is something that I always wanted, but never quite knew how it was going to happen.

I did a lot of theater in college, and I knew that not many people make it, but I just figured, ‘Well, I really want to try acting while I’m young, and I don’t ever...

I was shocked when I came to New Orleans. I never knew there were beggars on the streets here. I didn’t know that there were poor people. I thought this was Heaven, you know?

I worked every day there, so I knew all the details. But I needed only some proof. So the proof was photos.

I don’t want to sound too bleeding heart, because I know how lucky I’ve been, but I never knew how hard it was to be the lead in a television show.

There were some people you had to stay away from, people who poisoned everything in reach. Then there were people you wanted to stick with, the ones with silver tongues and golden touched. And then,...

When I was on the X-Factor, I found that I grew a lot as a performer. I knew I could sing but I didn’t believe in myself enough… I needed to hear that I was...

The biggest risk I’ve ever taken is going on American Idol and trying to be myself. I wasn’t going to try too hard to conform, and I knew that it could possibly not work out.

I planned my success. I knew it was going to happen.

When I first decided to open a restaurant, I was turned down by several banks. It was the late 80’s and many restaurants were failing. I refused to give up because I knew I had...

I played football for a team called the East Dragons on the east side of town. We only had six regular season games. And six games I played tail back and I had 18 touchdowns...

If you knew how meat was made, you’d probably lose your lunch.

People have made a living deconstructing Lennon and The Beatles songs because of their compositional sophistication. But what’s so exciting about John is that he never had any of that training on musical theory; something...

I knew nothing about martial arts. And I don’t really like it! But in the film, I not only had to pretend that I knew all about it, I had to be the best at...

I grew up in the era when Dan Rather hated Richard Nixon. He was a newsman, but you knew what his opinion was.

I knew going in that being a single parent would be one of the toughest jobs I’d ever have. I’d been a talk-show host, actor, comic, and on and on, but this gig was going...

Blade Runner helped make my career. Everybody was in it. Who knew?

I had a nightmare about being on a cruise ship and the ship going down. It was an arduous process of the ship going down and we knew it was going down. There was everyone...

I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.

That is what I did with Jack, and that’s why he liked to do the readings with me because he knew I was there for him, and for our ability to blend the poetry and...

I knew what I wanted to do in sport from the age of nine.

The Dolls were the forefathers of glam. You never knew if they were going to kiss you or punch you. More than likely, they’d do both.

Despite an unqualified understanding that U.S. national security was inextricably bound up with Britain’s survival, F.D.R. knew that his reelection in part rested on the hope that he would keep the country out of war.

Naturally enough when I was a young dancer, I was terribly anxious to get ahead, and to get ahead quickly. I was impatient with all those older people who talked of the long grind to...

I was really hyperactive as a kid and no one knew how or where I got all this energy.

College is expensive; I always knew that, and I wanted to make money, partially to spend a little of it here and there, but primarily for a college savings fund.

Buddy Rich was one of the most incredible technicians in the world, on this planet, but the only people he could really impress, who knew what he was doing was another musician or another drummer.

Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every moment. Cares I knew not, and cared naught about them.

I was raised in Hollywood and knew, from as early as grammar school, classmates who were in the business.

I wanted to escape so badly. But of course I knew I couldn’t just give up and leave school. It was only when I heard my mom’s voice that I came out of my hiding...

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.

I learned French in Tunis, along with Arabic. I also learned French history. I knew the entire history of the kings of France. And I was fascinated by Versailles.

I never went to concerts when I was a kid, so I never knew if what I was doing onstage was right.

We took dancehall and hip-hop and mixed it in the middle. I knew we had something. I thought, ‘This sound is Puerto Rican sound.’