I met Leonardo DiCaprio and Busta Rhymes the same night, on my birthday in New York.

Well, I started conducting kind of by accident. I wanted to give myself a special birthday present for my fortieth birthday, and I was living in San Francisco at the time and I started attending some of the concerts and then simply dropping hints.

In college, I wrote newspaper articles and songs. Then, on my 21st birthday, I sold my first book. It was a nonfiction book about women pirates - 'Pirates in Petticoats.' After that, I was a book writer for good.

Every year before a big competition, I get hurt doing stuff I should not be doing. One year it was my little brother's 12th birthday. We all played hide-and-seek late at night. I climbed up a 30-foot tree, thinking he'd never catch me. I tripped and fell on one of the branches and I hit my head.

At her birthday, my seven-year-old daughter will say that she wants these big cakes and certain expensive toys as presents, and I can't say no to her. It would just break my heart. But when I was little, for birthdays we just played outside and we were happy if we got any cake.

All I watch is the Food Network. I took a cheesemaking class a few weeks ago, and I told my family and friends to only get me kitchen stuff on my birthday. I'm into every kind of cookbook and anything by Anthony Bourdain. I'd love to own a restaurant if I could find the right chef.

I'm really not the party type. I more like to have friends over at the house and chill. I've never been the super party type. But for the 18th birthday, you got to party. And then 21 is going to be even bigger.

I was only 16 when I was selected for 'Madrasapattinam.' I celebrated my 17th birthday on the set of the film. That was the first time I had travelled to India, and it was a rollercoaster ride. I soon fell in love with the country.

I've looked after my money. As I started working around my third birthday, my first check went straight to the bank.

I just have to attend someone's birthday party or go out for dinner with someone else for us to be in a relationship. That's not going to stop me from socialising, but tell me, which girl would want to be with a guy who goes to bed early and gives more importance to the gym?

I was put on a pony as a kid at some birthday party when you're all led around.

I don't like to party. I like to spend time with family on my birthday.

Til the day I didn't play under-19 World Cup, nobody ever celebrated my birthday. And the moment I played for Indian team, my family got excited and ordered and cut a cake for me in front of 40-50 family members.

If I go away, I take a little picture of my son. It's in a frame with a speaker, and he recorded a birthday message for me when he was nine or 10. I can't listen to it without filling up.

For my fifth birthday, I got a small tennis racket. That's how I started.

I think my first album was a gift for my birthday and a Faith Hill album; I loved her.

My first paying job might have been doing a play, actually. My mom paid me to dress up as a flounder at my sister's 'Little Mermaid' - themed birthday party when I was little.

There are two kinds of people in crisis situations - those who fight and those who freeze. I'm a freezer, and that's just going by the couple of surprise birthday parties I've had thrown for me.

I started performing non-professionally at birthday parties and family gatherings doing 'Saturday Night Live' impressions at four. Then I started for real at seven.

On my actual 16th birthday, on the actual day, I went home and I had chicken korma and Peshwari naan bread and pilau rice, and that was fantastic.

The question on my husband's birthday is always, What do you get for the man who has nothing?

For my 9th birthday, my only wish was to eat like a farmer boy. I had devoured 'The Little House on the Prairie' book series and wanted to be like Almanzo Wilder, the protagonist of 'Farmer Boy,' one of the later installments in the 'Little House' series.

I want a chainsaw very badly, because I think cutting down a tree would be unbelievably satisfying. I have asked for a chainsaw for my birthday, but I think I'll probably be given jewelry instead.

I was born in Korea and left before my first birthday.

The first posh meal out I had was on my 10th birthday.

The Queen of Crafts herself, Martha Stewart, and I have the same birthday. I prefer to think it's the glue-gun wielding, perfect-tart-producing Martha and not the copper pan-throwing, jail-going Martha. But I suppose if I am going to share a calendar square with some of Martha, I have to share it with all of Martha.

Since graduation, I have measured time in 4-by-5-inch pieces of paper, four days on the left and three on the right. Every social engagement, interview, reading, flight, doctor's appointment, birthday and dry-cleaning reminder has been handwritten between metal loops.

I'm a very keen baker; I pride myself on my cakes. I go along the classic sponge line, but I like to jazz it up: I've made some psychedelic birthday cakes.

In the winter of 2012, as my fiftieth birthday approached, I began to write what turned into my autobiography, a look at my own life through the lens of food.

I trained to be a priest - started to. I went to seminary school when I was 11. I wanted to be a priest, but when they told me I could never have sex, not even on my birthday, I changed my mind.

The great children's author and illustrator Shirley Hughes marks her 90th birthday by appearing as Michael Berkeley's guest in 'Private Passions'.

Nick Swardson used to have birthday paint parties. They were phenomenal.

My family's dog, when I was growing up, was an adopted dog that I got in a shelter for my birthday. I've always felt really strongly about adopting animals and trying to save animals' lives.

I had a 'Cats' phase, where I did lots of overturned furniture and trash cans. I asked for a fog machine for my birthday.

Jesus' birthday is commercialized, so of course, Black History Month is commercialized.

Does Martin Luther King really want his birthday commercialized?

As he approached his 28th birthday in February 1840, Dickens knew himself to be famous, successful and tired. He needed a rest, and he made up his mind to keep the year free of the pressure of producing monthly installments of yet another long novel.

If you are an actress in L.A., on your 40th birthday they should just hand you the keys to the lunatic asylum.

As a child, I always chose a false nose and some face paint and a wig for my birthday.

Traditionally Presidents Day was Washington's birthday. It was celebrated as a public holiday on February 22 each year, in peace or in war.

I believe that if writers want their readers to care about a character, they have to care themselves. I have to root for a detective who screws up as much as Thorne does, who shares my birthday, my North London stomping ground, and my love of country music, both alt and cheesy.

Don't invite me to a surprise birthday party. I don't have room for that secret. I've got enough real secrets I have to keep: dark, life-destroying secrets.

I hate birthdays. I hate birthday parties. I hate them. I don't know what it is, anybody's only got to come wafting near me with a piece of cake with a candle on and I break out in hives.

I had Hallowe'en parties every year, as it was my birthday five days before. My parents would actually put prosthetic noses on, and my dad would wear a top-hat and tails, put on a fake curly moustache, and hold a pipe.

There's video footage of my 10th birthday where I'm wearing, like, a little pink T-shirt. Then my dad comes in brandishing a copy of 'Eraserhead,' going, 'Look what we've got for tonight!'

You know, we'd just had a birthday, he was... you know, he still had a future out of him, and all I can is he was just one of the most beautiful people in the world... a very gifted man, and it's a loss to the world, not just for us.

When Oscar Niemeyer died on December 5, 2012, ten days before his 105th birthday, he was universally regarded as the very last of the twentieth century's major architectural masters, an astonishing survivor whose most famous accomplishment, Brasilia, was the climactic episode of utopian High Modern urbanism.

My mother always bought our birthday gifts.

I married two weeks after my 18th birthday, far too young, and by the time I was 23 I was a single mother of three small children, Sean, Daniel and Victoria, living in a prefab house.

To my surprise, my 70s are nicer than my 60s and my 60s than my 50s, and I wouldn't wish my teens and 20s on my enemies.