For me, life is about experience and being a good person.

In fact the experience at Oxford has really helped me later in life.

My life experience has made me realise what's important and what is not.

I guess if there is a big spiritual experience in my life, it is me becoming a mother.

The song 'Can't Look Back Now' by the Weepies reminds me of the entire 'Life Unexpected' experience.

I've had one experience of writer's block in my life, and it was living hell. It was a terror for me.

I don't have to go to church. The church is within me and the experience is my own. It's my life experience.

I will perform My Heart Will Go On for the rest of my life and it will always remain a very emotional experience for me.

I would say that all of my experience on any set over the course of my life has helped me in directing 'Save Me Tonight.'

My experience in Iraq made me realize, and during the recovery, that I could have died. And I just had to do more with my life.

In order for me to write, I have to experience life. I write the songs based on real life, and I perform them from a very real place.

Books have always helped me make sense of things. With any life experience, you can find someone who has documented it in a poetic way.

It took awhile for me to get used to speaking candidly about my own life. I got into it, and it turned out to be a wonderful experience.

I have been in an experience where I thought everything that I had hoped for in my life was taken away from me, and I had to redefine what mattered.

My life has been extreme. Most people will not have the experience I've had. But the things that changed me, really changed me, they happen to everyone.

I'm going to Columbia University but I'm trying to keep that low-profile because I don't want weird people following me there. I want the experience of normal college life.

What I can say, categorically, is that working with Sarah Paulson and Kathy Bates will have been the most formative experience for me, as an actor, for the rest of my life.

The main thing is that I've been studying composition for the last four years. I'd say it's the life experience combined with the lessons that enabled me to go much further.

I know from my experiences in life that educators had an enormous impact and influence on me. And fortunately or unfortunately, I had a lot of experience with different educators.

To be able to experience a thousand different lives within my lifetime is something that always appealed to me. I wasn't content with just being one person for the rest of my life.

My life experience has taught me nothing happens by chance. Even the idea of the ball in a roulette game: it's not chance it ends up in a certain place. It's forces that are at play.

In a way then, the Divine Principle, this new revelation, is the documentary of my life. It is my own life experience. The Divine Principle is in me, and I am in the Divine Principle.

To want to be an actor is enough - you don't need to tell us about it. The interesting person who comes with some life experience is always the person who is going to be chosen by me.

I think that what's bizarre to me about life is that sometimes you have to have everything taken away before you experience grace or before you actually recognize that grace can happen to you.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

The national championship for Syracuse in 2003 will always be the high-water mark for me. That was my alma mater, my team, my players, our fans. That remains the top experience of my basketball life.

The entertainment industry is pretty nuts, and having had that experience outside of it and going to university has really made a big difference. It's important to me to feel like I have my own life.

My parents got me into tennis, and it's why I do what I do, and probably why I do it as well as I do it, because I've always had their guidance and their experience and their help throughout my whole life.

I did not want to go onstage and play Led Zeppelin songs; there has to be more than that. I wanted to create a complete experience of what Led Zeppelin means to me, growing up around them and being part of it all my life.

I guess I have a talent for humiliation, a place within me that experience can't reach, which is terrible in real life but something that comes in handy in writing. It seems as though humiliation has become a career for me.

Writing Part of the Scenery has been a very different experience. I have been reminded of people and events, real and imaginary which have been part of my life. This book is a celebration of the land which means so much to me.

I can get my voicemail transcribed and sent to me as e-mail. I want to be able to have my address book and all my life come up on my TV and video chat. The whole telecommunications experience through a wire is still very relevant.

I wrote 'Evil Spider' about wanting someone that's already taken. I guess it was based on a personal experience, but I went a lil extreme on the theme... me being a spider trying to snare someone. In real life, I was just observing!

The basic answer is that I wasn't happy or fulfilled by the job I had and I wanted my life to mean something to me, so I searched my life experience and realized that acting and performing were activities that I enjoyed all aspects of.

I have had the unfortunate experience of having someone write an unauthorised biography of me. Half of it is lies and the other half is badly written. My feeling is that if I'm going to write my life story, I ought to have my life first.

We can think so much about life and take ourselves so seriously; I mean, I like to tell people, 'Don't take life too seriously' because you'll cloud the experience. That's what the meaning of life is to me - being able to enjoy the moment.

I applied to Oxford in the '80s and was invited to an interview. It was like a scene from 'Billy Elliot.' People were making fun of me for my accent and the way I was dressed. It was the most embarrassing, awful experience I had ever had in my life.

An experience that shaped me happened early in my TV career when I filmed in Mozambique, Angola and Bangladesh for 'Blue Peter' and Comic Relief. Places with extreme poverty. When you see that first-hand as a young person, you take it with you for life.

I'd say most of my songs I write from personal experience. When I feel like I don't have any inspiration in my personal life, I think about others that are close to me and maybe what they're going through or even just people I've come across, acquaintances.

Can you blame them? We have to filter so much information these days. But it does make it difficult for an artist. I'm 46 years old now. I've had a lot of life experience and my voice has changed. People who expect the same old me are bound to be disappointed.

When people ask me for advice about when to come out, it's really about, before you do that, building a circle of support that can strengthen you through that experience. For me, it was my friends. There were people on 'My So-Called Life' that really helped guide me.

My stated goal as a filmmaker is to feel something. Is to have a palpable emotion in my life, carry it through the gauntlet of the filmmaking process and try and have it land for an audience at some point during the viewing experience. That to me is successful filmmaking.

I look back at Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, and especially Betty Carter, whom I admire the most, and I say, OK, they set a standard of excellence. I listen to them not for what they are doing, but to study where they are coming from because, for me, jazz is life experience.

Right before I graduated from the national theatre school, I got the part of Roxie Hart in 'Chicago' in Copenhagen. That led to me playing it here in London. I was 26 when I came over for that. It was the first thing I did as a professional, and it is still the experience of my life.

I loved making 'The Hunger Games' - it was the happiest experience of my professional life. Lionsgate was supportive of me in a manner that few directors ever experience in a franchise: they empowered me to make the film I wanted to make and backed the movie in a way that requires no explanation beyond the remarkable results.

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