Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.
I've experienced a private doubt, something that I've kept deeply inside, and then eventually delivered a piece of work that people responded to with huge enthusiasm.
I know there are people who are praying for my downfall, but they're going to be like, 'Wow, Xan's actually an artist.'
I know people didn't think I'd become a world champion - even people probably in my own camp, my own team, didn't think I'd become a world champion this quickly.
I had to host a comedy show the day after 9/11, and I really knocked it out of the park. But that was before the Internet really took off, so the only people that know are the people who were there.
It's interesting - years ago, I had such bad stage fright during musical theater auditions that I just gave up. And now I'm on Broadway.
Everybody is great when things are great. It's the 'not great' stuff that matters.
I'm not just a feel-good story.
Through my work, I've learned that if I love it, whether it's music, acting or any type of entertainment, I can overcome any of the obstacles that come my way.
I was totally picked on, but look at me now! I was definitely picked on by boys and girls. I was really lanky and skinny and the boys would say, 'Turn sideways and stick out your tongue, you look like a zipper.'
Systems, scientific or philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.
The greatest feeling of accomplishment for me is the fact that I was an athlete who was somewhat disabled.
The applause was so loud and insistent that I had to respond with several encores. I was numb with happiness, when it was over, I knew that this alone must be my life and my world.
Not until the human heart is stolid to poetry, the human eye blind to beauty, not until the intellect ceases its quest for truth and conscience finds its quietus either in universal defeat or in triumphant success, will organized religion cease to be.
Failure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy.
It is strange when you're a loser in college, which I was, to then get your own show.
