Being in the studio, for me, can be a miserable experience - I can really psych myself out.

It's OK to feel pain and experience it. I'm not trying to fix myself. My suffering has given me so much.

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

I think just being able to experience college gymnastics the way I have has allowed me to really express myself and have so much fun in the sport.

As an actor, the experience that I have as a politician while sitting in Parliament - that helps me enrich myself as an actor. But I am an actor first.

If I stay alert, then I can challenge myself, and by challenging myself, that helps me to stay alive and to hopefully take something away from the experience.

I feel like it's my duty to share my experience with self-acceptance. I don't want to bore people and talk about myself, but the biggest struggle for me was my body.

For me as an actor, I find it's most creative when I'm bringing myself into the role rather than putting the role on. I feel like it's more of a cathartic experience.

For me, the desire exists less to get myself a degree than to just go and have the whole college experience, and throw myself into the brain pool and see if I can swim.

I'm trying to use myself and my own flawedness as a metaphor for general human experience. I'm trying to 'stand next to' a subject, whether it's Bobby Knight or Vince Carter, and use that subject to meditate on both him and me.

You dream about the Olympics for so long and you have that one day, then it's over, and when you don't run well there is this huge letdown. It took me years to deal with that. I feel like I almost had to cleanse myself of that experience.

Six is the hardest number for me to experience, the smallest. It's the absence of something - it's cold, dark, almost like a black hole. If someone tells me they are depressed, I might imagine myself in the hole of a six to help me empathise.

That's an important lesson for me, to not qualify my experience against somebody else's. My experience is the experience that I wanted to have, and have created for myself, but it doesn't make me any more deserving than anybody else - or less.

I learned that the songs that mean the most to me are the songs that I write by myself. While there were people I wrote really well with, particularly Gary Nicholson and Delbert McClinton, and I really enjoyed the experience, I came away from it feeling like I need to write by myself.

Characters in TV and theatre tend to experience a lot of conflict, so I push myself through sport to physical and emotional levels that hurt so I've some other reference for extreme experience that isn't me shouting at my girlfriend or my mum. It's a way of controlling the uncontrollable.

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