I have a real passion for children. I always wanted to teach and only became an athlete because my parents told my brother Parenthesis and me that we should use any God-given talent we had. Gail Devers
I was already writing 'The Lost Symbol' when I started to realize 'The Da Vinci Code' would be big. The thing that happened to me and must happen to any writer who's had success is that I temporarily became very self-aware. Dan Brown
I went to art school when I was little. I took ballet lessons. I played a little kick ball. I was sort of into everything because I had too much energy and I didn't know where to put it. When I was a preteen, I got into singing, and became really obsessed with it. Amanda Seyfried
If he wins seven golds and ties what I did, then it would be like I was the first man on the moon and he became the second. If he wins more than seven, then he becomes the first man on Mars. We'd both be unique. Mark Spitz
If I believe that I became the best quarterback that I could possibly be, the best football player that I could possibly be... That's how I'm going to measure my career as a success or not. Tim Tebow
It's hard to mix with a crowd when you're walking down the hallway and everybody else is a foot shorter. I remember hanging out with my friends, like at the mall, and thinking people were staring at me and talking about me. It made me turn inside myself. I became more shy and quiet. Randy Johnson
Michael Jackson carried urban America and eventually American society on his vocal cords for a good 25 to 30 years before even hip-hop became the vox populi of America, and then as an adult he shattered racial barriers. Michael Eric Dyson
My family was all police and hard hats at the refineries; they didn't know what to think about me. So I became a closet writer. Robert Crais
Olympic Gold changed me and my life dramatically. I became a celebrity overnight and people see me as a famous skater, not a real person. Oksana Baiul
Once the brokerage house, rather than the bank, became the locus for American savings, that money would find its way into the stock market, because the broker was someone with a much higher tolerance for risk than the banker. Ron Chernow
Our favorite: a former garbage dump converted into a riverside park. I first ran there more than 30 years ago when a marathon passed through this park that later became home to Pre's Trail. Joe Henderson
Pete Rose came over to the Phillies in '79 and he became the catalyst that helped us to put it all together. Steve Carlton
Religion is the organization of spirituality into something that became the hand maiden of conquerors. Nearly all religions were brought to people and imposed on people by conquerors, and used as the framework to control their minds. John Henrik Clarke
Thanks to farm subsidies, the fine collaboration between agribusiness and Congress, soy, corn and cattle became king. And chicken soon joined them on the throne. It was during this period that the cycle of dietary and planetary destruction began, the thing we're only realizing just now. Mark Bittman
That's how easy baseball was for me. I'm not trying to brag or anything, but I had the knowledge before I became a professional baseball player to do all these things and know what each guy would hit. Willie Mays
The thing that happened to me and must happen to any writer who's had success is that I temporarily became very self-aware. Instead of writing and saying, 'This is what the character does,' you say, 'Wait, millions of people are going to read this.' It's sort of like a tennis player who thinks too hard about a stroke - you're temporarily crippled. Dan Brown