I originally started off as a healer before I came to Hollywood.

‘Clybourne Park’ was my first job after the birth of my son, who was 11 weeks old when we started rehearsals. And while that was truly harder than anything I’ve ever done, I was grateful every day to be going to work on such an incredible play, with such a generous, intelligent, supportive group of...

When I first started writing, I used to listen to music all the time because it would make time pass more quickly. And then I started to wonder if the music wasn’t affecting my writing in ways that I didn’t necessarily intend.

I suppose when I started playing guitar, it was the means to an end. I never thought of myself as a fully fledged guitar instrumentalist. And my early excursions on the electric guitar were curtailed when Eric Clapton came on the scene, and I decided I was never going to be in the same arena...

When I started writing seriously in high school, English was the language I had at my disposal – my Spanish was domestic, colloquial, and not particularly literary or sophisticated.

When I started to write culinary mysteries, I did it because nobody was doing it anymore.

I think I started out just loving the attention. But that’s changed into a real love and passion for my profession. Acting has never lost that challenge and excitement for me.

It is vital that there is a narrator figure whom people believe. That’s why I never do commercials. If I started saying that margarine was the same as motherhood, people would think I was a liar.

My mother bought a piano, put it in the front room, and I just started writing my songs.

I had fun doing a lot of low-budget movies and web series. And I got back into stand-up where I started.

I started dancing in my room… I wanted to find out more about my movements. I wanted to elaborate on whatever it was that I was doing there.

I started playing the violin when I was 5, but by the time I was 12 or 13, I wasn’t really liking it.

I started doing up-and-down strumming, basically to keep time and to play fast. As time went on, I started realizing other guitar players couldn’t do it. I always went against the grain.

Then, there was Greenpeace, I remember that when they first started out with the boats in the waters, and the guys in the boats between the whales and the boats that will hunting the whales with spear guns.

I’m a huge fan of James Dean, that got me started. Nowadays I smoke four packs in a day.

I started my own record label.

It’s been a fascinating thing because we didn’t really know how to write when we started South Park at all. It’s been like, we’ve just sort of grown up a bit and it’s amazing to just see how, if you take Butters and Cartman and put them in any scene, it works.

I’m from Chicago, my family started a chain of movie theaters in Chicago that were around for 70 years and then one of them became the head of Paramount and the other was the head of production at MGM and we all came out of Chicago.

Film directing has perfected my theater directing. I think when I first started directing, a lot of my stuff was very lateral; I was afraid to have the actors’ backs turned away, afraid to put them too far upstage, and I think once I did more things with film, I got more interested in composition.

But, Eminem… No, I’ve loved rap for a long time, especially when it got out of its first period and became this gangsta rap, ya know this heavy rap thing? That’s when I started to fall in love with it. I loved the lyrics. I loved the beat.

Hearing my songs in public freaks me out a bit. There was one restaurant I really liked in L.A., but I had to stop going there when they started playing my music. It felt kinda awkward.

We sat around and I fed them barbecue and whiskey. And pretty soon everyone started to compete with each other on the guitars. It seemed the more everyone drank and ate, the more everyone got into it.

One of my first thoughts I had when I started considering the mastectomy was, ‘What am I going to look like?’ And then, ‘What will my husband think?’

Well, I haven’t been doing that much work with other people per se. I started doing more of that.

I was 18 when I first started working at a restaurant. I was a dishwasher. I only got the job because I wanted to go to Ibiza for vacation, and washing dishes was the only job I could find.

I started in the theater when I was 10, so I grew up in the theater and was very used to that, but I love movies and television, also, obviously.

I didn’t even know Michele before we started the show but we became great friends, and still are.

I started writing songs at 17.

President Obama’s reelection started the countdown for lawmakers to address the fiscal cliff and the statutory debt limit. Unless the President and House Republicans can agree on changes to current law, the U.S. economy will be in recession by spring.

I can say, and I am responsible for what I am saying, that they have started to commit suicide under the walls of Baghdad. We will encourage them to commit more suicides quickly.

In Britain, eponymous lifestyle branding as we know it started in the late 1960s, with two fascinating families – the Conrans and the Ashleys – who in increasingly brilliant settings and catalogues sold rather different visions of what the new ideal upper-middle-y life looked like.

I was practically born and raised at 20th Century Fox studio, started to work there selling papers when I was around seven years old, and every summer vacation from school I would work in a various department at the studio. So I was an old-timer when I was 15.

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve felt comfortable in a suit. It all started when my mom bought me a three-piece Pierre Cardin suit. I wore that thing everywhere. Eventually I realized I was going to be the kid who got beat up in school, but I kept wearing it.

When I started to record, I could sing in pitch, but that was maybe about it.

In my early 30s, I started to realise I was avoiding something on a personal level, but also as a writer. I was in denial about who I was, and was trying to be someone who I was not.

I went to Brunel University and very much wanted to go on to do a PhD in management, but then my acting career started to take off. In those days when you switched on the box there were hardly any brown or black faces.

A friend of mine that I was in a band with started me on Kafka, which in turn led to Camus and Sartre.

Virtually all of Africa’s civil wars were started by politically marginalized or excluded groups.

Things started to get out of control when I began reading that I was a superstar.

Of course, I started really being a comics fan with the underground stuff in the ’70s.

This is a great time for the ‘guerilla marketer.’ The days when you used to have to buy expensive TV time and a yellow page ad to get started are gone.

I found a correlation between the spreading of democracy after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise in slavery. Now, as countries, former Communist countries, became so-called democratic, people started to be enslaved by their own countrymen.

In primary school I was terrible. I don’t think I was particularly well behaved in high school, but I started to apply myself.

He actually came up to me and we started speaking. And from that conversation we were able to come to a meeting of the minds and it seemed as if it was clear to me that he wanted to do similar things to what I wanted to do.

At fourteen, I started sending out demo tapes.

Then people started using it more and more and it became the most downloaded software on the internet.

Age is just a number. When I started, I never worried about how long I was going to play. I had very specific goals, and that’s what I really chased.

When I started writing about art, there were no curators.

When I started at Microsoft, I was lucky enough to be part of the rise of the client-server paradigm.

As president of the American Historical Association, I started a programme to make dissertations into e-books in 1999. Before I knew it, I was involved in other electronic projects. Harvard invited me to become director of the libraries in 2007.