I didnt learn until I was about 26 that my dad was a national ballroom dancing champion. He won loads of trophies. Im not sure why he was so quiet about his achievements. Maybe he thought ballroom dancing wasnt a manly thing to do.
I've wasted the last five years of my life dealing in religious articles. People today find spiritual solace in ballroom dancing.
If you're running a 26-mile marathon, remember that every mile is run one step at a time. If you are writing a book, do it one page at a time. If you're trying to master a new language, try it one word at a time. There are 365 days in the average year. Divide any project by 365 and you'll find that no job is all that intimidating.
Growing up in the Soviet Union, ballroom dancing wasn't the coolest thing to do. But that probably made me tougher, because it wasn't an easy task to do ballroom dancing and not get bullied. And I never got bullied in my life, even though I changed to five secondary schools in three different countries.
I feel like I wasn't making music that meant anything to me until I was 26 years old, so I'm realizing that sometimes it takes three years or five years to understand what the point of even making music together is.
When I was growing up, Asians weren't known for dancing. I knew all my older aunts and uncles did, like, ballroom dancing and stuff. And then you saw all those dance crews, like Quest and Jabbawockeez, and now they're, like, known for dance.
The 2013 Boston Marathon was, for me, a milestone. A bucket list event that was supposed to be my last marathon until my next big milestone, turning 50. But I couldn't leave marathoning on a memory like that, so I am running this year to honor everyone in the running community and those unsung heroes from April 15, 2013.
I grew up dancing. When I was three years old, my mom would always watch Latin ballroom dancing competitions on PBS.
For the first five years of music and first five years of acting, I don't remember it because I was running to where I was going. Finally I was like, 'Man, I missed everything.' So I just stopped, and I started looking around.
It's great that ballroom dancing is being recognised. For many years ballroom dancers were misunderstood and other dance forms didn't want anything to do with us.
There are so many people that do things better than I do: dancing, singing like a black girl, singing country. Or if, while they sing, they move their arms in and around their crotch; when I sing, I play the piano and look like a little choirgirl. I'd like to mix it up like that.
I think animation is like running a marathon, and making a movie is like a 100 meter sprint. The question is: are you a marathon man or are you a sprinter? I realized that I was more of a sprinter than a marathon man. With a long, long project, I get bored easily.
Everest has a special place in all of our imaginations. For centuries, Everest was a little bit like the moon. It was the place where everyone wanted to go. Empires wanted to be able to say that they were the first to put a climber on top of Everest. So when a tragedy happens up on that mountain, I think it has a global resonance. Everybody's heard of Everest. Everybody knows what Everest is and what it means, and the significance.
You don't run 26 miles at five minutes a mile on good looks and a secret recipe.
My mother was a music teacher and my grandfather was a professor of music, and there was a lot of singing in the family. It wasn't like trained singing or anything like that, but it was singing.
I'm not going to change who I am. I'm not going to change why I'm running... I'm running for president [in 2016], and I'm running because we can't afford another four years like the last eight years.