I realized that I needed to be anonymous on the street and somebody else on the stage. I had tried to put my street self on the stage, but what they want is an actor on stage.
As soon as I was out in the street, I realized I didn't want to be alone after all, I realized I didn't want to be anything at all.
Friendship is definitely the most difficult detail on the globe to elucidate. It is really not something you understand at school. But if you have not realized the which means of friendship, you truly have not realized anything.
I think I went into poli-sci because I knew there was a stage, plus I thought I wanted to help people, and I realized in poli-sci that if you want to be a politician you're either born into it, or you've got an amazing brain, which those are rare - and I don't have one.
I felt I couldn't lose anything else, but just then I realized I already had: I'd lost the hope that I would ever be loved in just that way again.
Little did I know that earning a living at stand-up is the hardest thing you can do. But once I started doing it, I just loved it, and I realized that I was actually kinda good at it, and then that was it.
I mean, I guess I realized subconsciously that this is what I should be doing before I realized it, consciously. Verbally, I don't think I had committed to it, even though I was driving everywhere, every night, just trying to get on stage.
When I first prepared this particular talk... I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn't been done. And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web. Because the web has produced so much uninformed criticism. It's kind of a Gresham's Law-bad money drives the good money out of circulation. Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can't criticize anything.
I was a total athlete. I loved sports, but when I realized I wasn't going to be a professional athlete, I realized I wanted to be in movies.
After I went to college, I realized that no matter how much I loved sports, I was ready to have fun, and that was right when I started to sing.
I always knew I had a voice and I've always known I could sing, but I was too shy to let it come out. I think it's the hardest thing to do, to sing in front of people. When I finally let go and did it, I realized it's what I'm most talented at and what I love to do the most.
I realized very early that I was never going to make by living by writing string quartets. But I wanted to write music and I didn't want to have to do anything else.
I never solicited myself as a singer until I realized I could use that to a musical standpoint. I loved musicals growing up. Classic films were some of the only ones I watched. So when the opportunity came for the show to audition, of course it was all of a sudden, "I sing! I sing! Send me in, please. I beg of you."
As a Fox News Channel contributor, I've learned most of the tips over the years: look into the camera like it's a good friend; pull your suit jacket down and sit on it so it doesn't bunch up; and most importantly, never, ever say anything while sitting in that studio that you wouldn't want someone else to hear.
It occurred to me the thing that broke my heart the most was when I grew up and realized everything wasn't an adventure. I got to a certain age and realized I couldn't be Indiana Jones.
Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. . . . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates.