When you have a diagnosis of cancer, or any serious illness, your choices are basically to be passive and kind of accept whatever is offered you, or to be active and to learn about your disease, and understand your options, and be an active partner with your doctor. That's the course I took with all three of my cancers.
I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.
I had wanted to play drums since the age of 9 when I saw a drum set in the window of a music store for the first time. We took lessons at a local music school and began playing together after about 6-9 months of lessons.
One thing that took a while to really adjust to was, you do it for the the art, for the money, for being together and having a good time, but you do it for all those people out there who really care about the show. We are now talking about a show we did over 20 years ago.
Frank Sinatra taught me how to do him. It took me seven years to master him. He would tell me, tap your foot, Rich, and don't forget to grasp your sleeve.
I took an interest in the Civil Rights Movement. I listened to Martin Luther King. The Vietnam War was raging. When I was 18, I was eligible for the draft, but when I went to be tested, I didn't qualify.
To those of you who are wearing ties, I think my dad would appreciate it if you took them off.
Then I studied theology in college, and when I was getting a Ph.D. in literature, I took courses in New Testament studies and studied Greek versions of the Gospels.
I took anatomy classes. I went to medical libraries and talked to doctors and nutritionists. I did the whole thing before using myself as a human guinea pig.
It took me 45 minutes to get in all of the suits and putting all the dosimeters on me so that they knew how much radiation I got and the protective boots and everything.
My father is an actor, so he brought me into his agency when I was young. It wasn't something I wanted to do until high school, when I started taking theater and really liked it. Then an agent found me and wanted me to come out to Los Angeles and give it a shot. I gave myself six months, but it only took me like a week to get a job.
Mike Judge, who I've become friends with over the years never took himself seriously as an artist.
I played a great horse yesterday! It took seven horses to beat him.
I always took 'Coronation Street' a year at a time anyway. It was the 50th anniversary; I'd been there five years. It just felt right to leave.
I think I finally chose the graduate degree in engineering primarily because it only took one year and law school took three years, and I felt the pressure of being a little behind - although I was just 22.
It took me a long time to be accepted as an actress, I think, because of the modeling and because of my mother.
I wanted to be a writer-performer like the Pythons. In fact, I wanted to be John Cleese, and it took me some time to realise that the job was, in fact, taken.
When I was 12 years old, someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing and even then I knew I was having a great experience. It was as if somebody was moving through space like no one ever did before.
Jazz sometimes can be really complicated and inaccessible to people because they don't know what to start with. You can start with something that you love, but if you start with something that you hate, then it's like, 'You know what, I hate jazz.' It took me a lot of time to catch on to jazz, too.
We were sitting on the bus one day and there were 5 of us hanging out. There was only one beer left in the cooler and we actually all took a little cup and split it. It was a pathetic day in a rock and roll when five grown men have to be sitting there sharing a beer.
I was one of seven, and we took a lot of road trips - long road trips. And this was before iPhones and iPads and DVD players in cars. I remember how novel it was when I got my own Walkman so I could listen to music.
I don't know what the big issue is about a kiss with Neve Campbell in Wild Things. It's a role, and I think a bigger issue is made out of it. It was a part I took and it's what the character did, so I did it.
I recently took up ice sculpting. Last night I made an ice cube. This morning I made 12, I was prolific.
Film, as far as I'm concerned, is my area of artistic endeavor, so I never think of a movie that gets released as being all done-it's just when they took it away from you.
The extremists took over the primary process.
I willingly took John Lennon's life. What I did was despicable.
I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer.
But he knew people and he was head writer for Have Gun Will Travel, and if you took those early Star Treks that we did and put us in a western wardrobe and put us on wagon train going west, we can say the same lines.
Warren Beatty took an interest in my career at one point.
My son, Jett, is two, and when I was pregnant my nose got bigger, so I got a new one. Everything was bigger for a while after having Jet, but I knew I needed to be able to walk up my stairs without being winded. It took me two years to lose 60 lbs - lots of walking, bike-riding, kick-boxing and performing.
Cara Delevingne and I took an eyebrow selfie. We both have prominent eyebrows, but hers are much better than mine. Maybe we should do a swap.
It took me seventeen years to get three thousand hits in baseball. I did it in one afternoon on the golf course.
I always took it for granted that there would be life after Hollywood.
There's no such thing as an overnight success. It took me a long to get there.
I was so low that I wanted to exit. And I took a bunch of pills, and they were sleeping pills. And at least they would put me to sleep, and maybe I wouldn't wake up, and that was fine.
I was a queen, and you took away my crown; a wife, and you killed my husband; a mother, and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long.
