I started running because my neighbour, Patrick Sang, was an athlete and I wanted to be just like him. Patrick came from the same village as I do and my mother used to be his teacher. I was so inspired by his success.

I told my mom the reason I started working out was because I wanted to break the necks of the people picking on me. I wanted to hurt them. I said I didn't want any teacher to put me down any more.

I've always been a music fan. I played trumpet. When I was in 4th grade, we were getting demos from the music teacher about different instruments we could play, and I said I wanted to play the trumpet right away. It was easy: it just had three valves.

As a kid, I had this ultimate goal to be a teacher. I wanted to be a history teacher like my dad.

At art school, a teacher said: 'The best paintings are when you get lost in a piece of work and start painting in a stream of consciousness.' I wanted to do music, not art, so started writing lyrics that way. The first song I wrote was called 'Ice Cream and Wafers.' The next was 'Holding Back the Years.'

My art teacher was really encouraging me, because he really liked that I could draw. I felt very torn. At that time, I had to pick one, and I felt much more confident in the arts than I did in chemistry. My big thing was that I actually wanted to be like Jacques Cousteau.

I wanted to be an English teacher. I wanted to do it for the corduroy jackets with patches on the side. When I got to college, as I was walking across campus one day, I ripped off a little flyer for this sketch-comedy group. It ended up being one of the greatest things I've ever done.

Once I understood Bach's music, I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was that teacher who introduced me to his world.

My teacher wanted me to do 'Hot Cross Buns,' but all I wanted to learn was 'Island in the Sun' by Weezer.

Most of my teachers wanted to send me to the principal's office. But my fourth-grade teacher once put her arms around me and said, 'You sure write well.' And I've had good penmanship until this day. She was the only one who ever said anything nice to me. That's the kind of motivation that students need.

I wanted to be in the police force, a teacher, a judge, lawyer, doctor, and other jobs. Of course, my mind changed as I started to face reality.

I wanted to be a teacher, but I was a lousy student, one of the slowest readers. It was a tremendous struggle. But I'm lucky I had some teachers who saw something in me.

I've never wanted sympathy votes in anything I do in my life.

Success is different for everyone; everybody defines it in their own way, and that's part of what we do in 'Close Up', finding what it was each person wanted to achieve and what their willingness to sacrifice for that was.

I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.

Music makes us want to live. You don't know how many times people have told me that they'd been down and depressed and just wanted to die. But then a special song caught their ear and that helped give them renewed strength. That's the power music has.

I wanted to play sports my whole life. That's all I really wanted to do.

As a child I was very involved with sports and I knew at age 9 that I wanted to be an Olympic champion.

In sports, people reach their peak very early. You have to move on. I don't know if I will ever surpass what I did at the Olympics, but I'm still doing the work I always wanted to do.

I wanted to be a sportswriter because I loved sports and I could not hit the curve ball, the jump shot, or the opposing ball carrier.

They wanted me to play more sports because they were acutely sensitive to their children being one hundred percent American, and they believed that all Americans played sports and loved sports.

I enjoy sports. I get a real joy from playing sports but I don't look for those movies. Oliver Stone wanted to know if I would do Any Given Sunday and it just didn't appeal to me.

I had played sports all my life, and I thought that was going to be the way. But I saw where the potential in football was going to end. When it comes to decision-making, I just follow my gut at the end of the day. And if I don't, I get in trouble. I wanted to become a filmmaker.

I originally wanted to go into sports, but my first concert was KISS at the shooting of 'KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park.' The minute I saw Gene and Paul... it was all over. I knew that's what I wanted to do.