I first became interested in women and religion when I was one of the few women doing graduate work in Religious Studies at Yale University in the late 1960's.
‐‐ Carol P. Christ
I first began to dry specimens for preservation carelessly perhaps at first, but before the season was over, I had collected between one and two hundred species.
‐‐ George Bentham
I first began to read religious books at school, and especially the Bible, when I was eleven years old; and almost immediately commenced a habit of secret prayer.
‐‐ Francis W. Newman
I first bought a Buffy Sainte-Marie record when I was 12, and her music has always remained with me. In the 1960s, as a political activist, Buffy's lyrics were fearless, and I'm very grateful for all the risks that she took.
‐‐ Morrissey
I first came across Chadron, Nebraska, by accident in 1994.
‐‐ Poe Ballantine
I first came across 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' in college, with other anthologized poems by Yeats.
‐‐ Billy Collins
I first came across the script for 'Macbeth' between the ages of 11 and 12; it was the first book that shook my life. Because I did not yet understand that I could simply purchase it in a bookstore, I copied much of it by hand and took it home. My childhood imagination pushed me to feel like a co-author of the play.
‐‐ Ismail Kadare
I first came on the scene during the Johnson years and that crowd was out all the time enjoying themselves. Nixon wasn't particularly social but a lot of the people in his administration were.
‐‐ Sally Quinn
I first came out against Castro in June 1968, fifteen months after my book had been published, and you cannot imagine how quickly a void was created around me.
‐‐ Guillermo Cabrera Infante
I first came to Brazil in the Sixties. Then I started coming back every year since touring most of the country. I grew to love it, the people, the music. I thought this is where I belong. I've been living in Brazil for the past 23 years. I call it my stress-free country.
‐‐ Dionne Warwick
I first came to China as a child on a visit with my family in 1978.
‐‐ Rebecca MacKinnon
I first came to cinema as a passionate filmgoer, when I was a child. Then, when I was a very young man, I became a film critic precisely because of my knowledge of cinema. I did better than others because of this. Then I moved on to screenwriting. I wrote a film with Sergio Leone, 'Once Upon a Time in the West.' And then I moved to directing.
‐‐ Dario Argento
I first came to Jewish-Catholic relations in 1963, while studying for the rabbinate at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.
‐‐ David Novak
I first came to London as a musician, and when my group broke up, I did 'Guys and Dolls' at the Watford Palace theatre. After that, Ned Sherrin found me and brought me to the West End to do one of his shows. The work went from strength to strength, so I thought: 'This is where the world wants me; I'll stay.'
‐‐ Clarke Peters
I first came to London when I was 22 and working as a roadie. Having watched the 'News At Ten' all my life, I thought Big Ben was going to be massive, but I was underwhelmed.
‐‐ Noel Gallagher
I first came to Russia because of the culture, literature and music... and my interest in the 19th-century revolutionary spirit of Herzen, Bakunin and Kropotkin. Russia is a wonderful place to bring new clowns because Russians give back a wonderful response.
‐‐ Patch Adams
I first came to think about media and politics in the late 1960s, having observed some distortions up close, but since then I wouldn't say that my personal experience has remained an important motive for my writing about media.
‐‐ Todd Gitlin
I first conceived of my far-future setting 'Punktown' in 1980, and though it contains 'punk' in its name, the term 'cyberpunk' hadn't been coined yet. I took my inspiration strictly from punk music.
‐‐ Jeffrey Thomas
I first considered writing 'New York' in 1991. I'd been in the city for a decade, was married to an American wife, and sending my children to New York schools. I was even on the board of a coop building. But I wasn't sure how to organize such complex material, and for many years I put the project aside.
‐‐ Edward Rutherfurd
I first decided that I wanted to act when I was 9. And I was at a very bizarre prep school at the time; to say 'high Anglo-Catholic' would be a real English understatement.
‐‐ John Hurt
I first decided to become an actor at school. A teacher gave us a play to do and that had a major impact. At first, I wanted to work in the theatre, but there was something about the ambience of film, especially American films, that always attracted me.
‐‐ Jean Reno
I first did standup at a lesbian bar. I didn't know it was a lesbian bar at the time, but the lesbians loved me. I was huge among the lesbians and am to this day. I'm thrilled with the lesbian support.
‐‐ Seth Rogen
I first discovered my turn of pace when I was playing football as a kid.
‐‐ Michael East
I first drew the attention of my future husband when we were fourteen, on the freshman school bus for an epic field trip from Riverside, Calif. to Los Angeles, where we were taken to the L.A. Zoo as well as the Natural History Museum.
‐‐ Susan Straight
I first encountered Bradbury's writing when I was pretty young. He's a great bridge author between young-adult fiction and literature.
‐‐ Sam Weller
I first fell in love with comedy when I'd visit my granny as a kid. Trips to her house meant staying up late drinking Coca-Cola and watching 'Saturday Night Live'.
‐‐ Jessica Williams
I first fell in love with music when I was a little boy. When I first heard music, I felt the beauty in it. Then, being able to tap along on a table top and box was great, but my favorite thing to do was to watch records spin. I would almost get hypnotized by it. These things are what drew me in initially.
‐‐ Narada Michael Walden
I first found out I had cancer on my eye and lost an eye to this disease when I was 16, and I've since had cancer in my kidneys and pancreas and a host of other areas.
‐‐ Tom Rath
I first got a sense of that idea of nodality - but I didn't use the word back then - with 'The Missing of the Somme': that sense of a particular place in a landscape or on a map having some kind of tremendous power to draw us to itself... that made me conscious, and since then, really, it has been an abiding concern of mine.
‐‐ Geoff Dyer
I first got interested in DJing when I was a little kid. I just love music... Music's my passion; it's always been my whole life.
‐‐ Pauly D
I first got into acting when I was 14, coming back from a junior high school basketball game. My mom picked me up and she had been mentioning, prior to that, this community production of 'Godspell', a couple towns over. I was reluctant, at first, and she bribed me with some great dinner that was in that town, neighboring the theater.
‐‐ Skylar Astin
I first got into fruit when I was a teenager, when my life was changing in every way. The first time I had a mango, at like 18, I was like, 'Where has this been my whole life?'
‐‐ Scott Thompson
I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.
‐‐ August Wilson
I first got involved with ending world hunger, and I got hip to the facts about it - what a huge problem it was and how it wasn't a matter of not having food or not knowing how to end it, but it was a matter of creating the political will.
‐‐ Jeff Bridges
I first got involved with Mel Brooks through 'The Elephant Man.' Everybody knows now, but they didn't know at the time that he was the producer.
‐‐ John Hurt
I first got sick after I had my daughter, Kimberly, 21 years ago. I'd always been energetic and never had any serious medical problems. Then I got very sick with a high fever. They told me I had mononucleosis. I became pregnant right away with Sean, and after he was born, I never seemed to recover.
‐‐ Alana Stewart
I first got to know Charles in the late seventies when I wrote an article and then a book about him and I think at the time he came across as quite appealing, it was probably the height of his popularity.
‐‐ Anthony Holden
I first had the idea of writing a popular book about the universe in 1982. My intention was partly to earn money to pay my daughter's school fees.
‐‐ Stephen Hawking
I first had the thought about making a musical of 'Edwin Drood' as far back as 1971.
‐‐ Rupert Holmes
I first heard about 'genes' when I was six years old. At dinner one night, I heard my mom tell my sister, 'It's in your genes.'
‐‐ Anne Wojcicki
I first heard African drum rhythms and chants at the movies. Then, when I had the opportunity to go to Africa and visit the villages, I heard the real, raw, true rhythms and realised the origins of the old Negro spirituals I grew up with in the South.
‐‐ Isaac Hayes
I first heard the story of Agnes Magnusdottir when I was an exchange student in the north of Iceland.
‐‐ Hannah Kent
I first learned how to do hair from drag queens. I learned eyelashes are the key to life, because they make everyone look fabulous.
‐‐ Tabatha Coffey
I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti.
‐‐ Henry Louis Gates
I first met Bev Shea while in Chicago when he was on Moody Radio. As a young man starting my ministry, I asked Bev if he would join me. He said yes, and for over 60 years we had the privilege of ministering together across the country and around the world.
‐‐ Billy Graham
I first met Kim Dae Jung when he was a Korean dissident whose life was threatened by the military regime ruling in Seoul. I was Ronald Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, and Kim was directed to me because the East Asia Bureau at the State Department had long shunned him.
‐‐ Elliott Abrams
I first met Michael Angel when he came to my office with a box of prints and asked me whether I thought he should make dresses from the prints.
‐‐ Aslaug Magnusdottir
I first met Miles Davis about 1947 and played a few jobs with him and Sonny Rollins at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. During this period, he was coming into his own, and I could see him extending the boundaries of jazz even further.
‐‐ John Coltrane
I first met my husband when I was 15. He was very cool, in a band, all that kind of thing, but he took a long time to grow up. Our paths crossed again 10 years later, and after about two weeks I knew that was it. I'm glad I met him when I did, even though I was fairly young. Because I think sometimes you can crystallise into singledom.
‐‐ Natascha McElhone