Many clubs rejected me, but I wanted to be a footballer and to learn as quickly as possible, so I persisted until I got into Real Sociedad when I was 13.
I came from my hometown team, Real Sociedad, to the best team in England, to the best team in Spain, to the best team in Germany.
When I was a Real Sociedad player, we lost on every occasion we visited Camp Nou. Maybe that is normal for a small team, but with Liverpool and Real Madrid, you expect more.
I got a phone call from David Moyes: he was interested in me going out to Real Sociedad, and I was quite keen on the idea if I didn't get the Premier League club that I wanted. Going abroad appealed to me.
I feel great at Real Sociedad. It is a second family for me.
No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things
Out of all the clubs who were interested, I got the feeling that, deep down, Chelsea showed that they really wanted me. There were lots of reasons I came to Chelsea. They showed a real desire to get me to come here. I didn't have to think about it too much.
With Real Sociedad, I felt that I needed to leave.
It wasn't until '79 I won my first amateur championship, and then, by '81, I was 14, and I won my first world championship, which was amazing to me, and in a very real sense, that was the first real victory I had.
In the beginning, all I wanted to do was to be a singer and a dancer. That was my real groove, my real interest. When it came to doing films, my biggest goal was to do a commercial.
It's been incredible and I thank Real Sociedad. I've given everything to the club.
The dozens of people working on this at Digital Domain, they knew that you couldn't get away with almost photo real, because we had real real in the room. You have real real in the cut every four or five shots, so you have this constant yardstick built into the footage by virtue of there being no real robot there. So it became the standard of photo reality that the VFX team had to match.
It was crazy to say that I have the guidance of Paul Heyman out of all these people. Eight-year-old real me is like, is this real life?
I was born in Poland, and then I was six years in France. I returned to Poland, and then, at the age of eight and a half, we came to Germany.
From 13/14 I was always hanging about with older boys. Boys in school used to call me names. But outside older boys would pay me attention because I looked older for my age. I was going to clubs from 14. I wanted to be loved.
I like to write about real people, real crimes. But what has increasingly come to interest me, and also appear to me as a challenge, is the idea of doing strange things with what is real. Take what is real and make it more or less real.