I just like really simple things. If I had been on tour for a while and I got to come back and take my girlfriend Eleanor on a date, we would go to the cinema and then out for dinner.
I was there in 2009 for the Matthew Shepard Foundation dinner. I was honored with an award - Making A Difference Award. It was a wonderful night.
I'm meticulous about tasting everything at the restaurant, so I taste all the preparations before lunch and dinner. That means tasting around 50 dishes twice. There are times when I think I can't taste another thing.
For me, being with Obama or having dinner with Bill Clinton... it's crazy. It's mind-blowing, because where I come from is just another world. We were just ignored by politicians - by America in general.
When you're friends with someone, you can't just go out to dinner and say 'O.K., now this is a date.' You've got to do something very different.
I don't know how other people perceive the lives of actors, but my life is fairly ordinary. I go to work, I come home, I put my kids to bed. If I'm home in time for dinner, I have dinner, and then it's bedtime.
The best movies have one sentence that they're exploring, a thesis, something that people can argue about over dinner afterward.
I was once up for a part, and the male star was also producing the movie. They were talking about meeting with him or having an audition with him, and then we get the message, 'He wants to have dinner with you.' I said, 'Is that the audition, or is it that he just wants to have dinner with me?'
I lead a simple life. I feed the fish. I walk the dogs. I cook dinner. Occasionally I take a meeting.
It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.
I watched some serious '80s television. 'Alice,' 'Good Times,' 'The Jeffersons,' 'Family Ties,' 'Cheers'... every night it was eat dinner, watch 'Cheers.' I was actually on 'Jeopardy' with Rebecca Lobo and Dot Richardson, and we were laughing because I was just nailing every random '80s trivia question - sitcom, theme music, movie, you name it.
My parents were active in the anti-war movement in the 1960s, so I grew up with a tradition of civic activism around our dinner table and going to different marches for different causes.
I don't care where you went to school. There - have I made your day? No? All right, I'll go further: I also don't care what your dad did for a living or how your mum voted. Nor do I mind whether you ate your tea in front of the telly, dinner at the kitchen table, or supper in the dining room.
You don't argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don't argue when a women tells you she's only making 80 cents to your dollar. It's the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.
When the Internet really first started to hit, people felt this would be the death blow: after suburbs and long commutes and television and the death of the family dinner, this would be the last straw that would totally break society.
Melville locked himself away in his room for months while working on 'Moby Dick.' If I ever decide to write a novel, I hope someone will take pity on me and take me out to dinner instead.
If I'm cooking dinner for my hubby or designing a line or selling on QVC, I try to do it in an authentic way. To speak to people like I want to be spoken to, to be a voice for people who don't have one and to give them things they need and love.
There are plenty of millionaires who would pay millions to hang a Van Gogh painting on the wall, but hardly one that would have ever had the crazy nut over for dinner. I feel like the big companies are like that with musicians. They'll say, 'We love music! It's all about the music!' - but if a musician shows up at the door, they call security.
On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.
A lot of my struggles with nutrition date back to my swimming days. I was a super-skinny young girl who would go through hours of intense training. Afterward, I'd be famished, but I had a two-hour trip home before dinner. When I did my hardest workouts, I often ate less; I was too tired to think about food.
It's easy enough to foist your music collection on your kids. Lectures are not required; you just play the stuff while they are prisoner in the back seat on a long drive, or softly in the background while eating dinner.
If you start eating with your mouth open - I can't stand it! I was out to dinner with a girl, and she started chomping on her food. You could see everything she was eating. I was like, 'So when do you want to go home?'
In the time it takes to heat a TV dinner, Clinton had convinced me that he was the smartest person in the room and that I was the center of his attention. In the next 25 years, I would see countless others fall just as quickly to the Clinton Touch.
I took one thing to heart that I heard from Sidney Poitier in 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.' And it resonated so much with me. He says: 'Dad, you always looked at yourself as a black man. I look at myself as a man.'
It's just an American tradition to make sure people don't leave hungry. The worst thing is to have them say, 'Great dinner, but now I have to go get a burger.'
I always stay with my parents. When you come home, you gotta do that. It's weird to be like, 'Hey, I'm at a hotel. Drive 20 minutes to see me, and we'll have dinner.'
There are a lot of funny people in my family. Absolutely. There were a lot of jokes growing up around the dinner table, for sure. We didn't grow up in a creative family.
I remember, when I was modelling in Japan, the agency would tell us that some guy wanted to take all the girls out to dinner, and I would be the one girl who didn't go - I didn't want to go out with a stranger.
My kids say if there's any family dinner that doesn't result in somebody crying, it's not a good dinner. They cry because it helps relieve them of a guilt or some onerous emotional burden. It's like a family tradition.
When it comes to romance, I'm really simple. I am really a 'dinner and a movie' type of person, and I love food, so surprise me and order something different or adventurous when it comes to food, and I'm like a kid at Halloween.
My parents never condescended to me. As a child, I always sat at the head of our dinner table. I was always given a lot of responsibility.
At the end of each year, I sit on the floor and go page by page through the old calendar, inking annual events into the new one, all the while watching my year in 'dinner withs' skate by. When I'm done, I save the old calendar in the box of the new one and put it with the others on a shelf.
I eat healthy and don't go by a diet chart. The breakfast is usually heavy, complemented with short frequent meals. My dinner is high on proteins and low on carbohydrates.
We always had lutefisk for Christmas dinner, after which Dad read from the Norwegian Bible.
My style overall is whatever is comfy, whatever I feel like wearing that day that I feel good in. I have some really classic pieces that I can dress up, dress down, wear to the movies or wear to a really nice dinner. And I love a really good leather jacket.
I'm not invited to the Vanity Fair dinner where they watch the Oscars - or even the Oscars themselves - so I sit at home and watch it with a bunch of close friends.
