To be honest, I probably wouldn't have gone to Hollywood if I hadn't been offered 'Ugly Betty' because I was a wee bit feart. But you have to make yourself frightened. That's what keeps you alive.
Part of your job as an artist is to push yourself and make sure your creative juices are flowing.
Make treating yourself a priority and always remember your life is happening now. Don't put off all your dreams and pleasures to another day. In any balanced personal definition of success there has to be a powerful element of living life in the present.
Serve yourself, put the food away, then eat.
I don't believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make.
You can't just dream about what you want and leave things to chance. You have to get it yourself.
I cannot control what goes on in another lane and this is how I focus on the Games. There is no point in being nervous of other swimmers. It's just about focusing on yourself and what you need to do in order to perform at your best.
You have great athletic directors, you let them run it; you keep yourself informed, but I'm not the athletic director. I'm the president of the university.
If you stay true to yourself and true to your vision and your own values, you can power through and make an impact on modern life.
My interviewing style and my approach to things is that, yes, it's okay to be sincere; it's okay to be yourself; it's okay to be real.
I think it's a very dangerous game to play when you assume that just because someone's an entertainer, they're automatically a role model. Entertainers are there to entertain. They aren't there to teach your children the lessons that you haven't bothered to teach them at home yourself. They're just doing their own version of entertaining.
I think feminism is that you just have to stick it all out. I remember this one time when someone interviewed me, and I was young, and they said, 'Do you see yourself as a feminist?' And I was like, 'I don't know. I'm not really comfortable calling myself a feminist.'
My political mission is as acute as ever. For me, in addition to kind of looking at the world and trying to engage in my society politically, having the kid around sort of makes me check in with myself. I think you're all busy trying to fix the world, but what about yourself?
To be at acting school, it was kind of the first time you felt the freedom to be as much of yourself as you wanted. People weren't going to judge you.
It's pretty funny, just driving by in a cab, and you see a huge billboard of yourself on the side of a hotel, like a 100-by-100 poster hanging up.
You can feel yourself trying too hard, doing too much. Nobody wants to watch somebody when they're needy, and actors are in the unfortunate position of needing to be cast and needing to be liked.
Writing is a very lonely occupation. To write you need to concentrate, to concentrate you need to lock yourself away. No distractions; you want your stream of thought uninterrupted.
When you're in school until you're 25 and you get out and suddenly structure is not handed to you, if you're smart you realize that you need to create structure for yourself.
When I was 20, I thought anyone in the music business over 25 is past it. Then at 30, you think anyone still doing it at 35 is ridiculous. Suddenly, you find yourself at 48 and still doing it, so I don't know what to say, really.
There are so many ways of posturing that people associate with being a writer. They imagine you wearing a beret and drinking only red wine and being full of yourself, and so, for a long time, the way I felt about writing was too private. I felt it too important and didn't want to be teased about it. So I lied about it.
I'd had an early stint in acting school, and there was something satisfying about becoming a character, about being inside another mind that you had to create out of yourself. As I moved toward a life in writing, I found many of the things I'd learned in acting school still applied.
I think every album you have, especially if it's done well, you feel like you're competing with yourself.
Get yourself into every audition that you can. Even in those for smaller roles, you'll never know when someone may recommend you for a bigger one.
Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.
I come from a background where you don't really talk about yourself much.
It's not easy to do morning TV. A lot of people think you just show up and be yourself, but one of the hardest things to do is be yourself when the camera comes on.
I think that's what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place.
Understand what you want, and want it as badly as you can. Make the stakes for yourself as life-or-death as you can.
This is a marathon in life. You can't be sprinting all the time or else you wear yourself out. You have to make sure you're taking care of yourself, keeping yourself grounded and not letting every little thing get you worked up.
You do things for yourself, and you do things for other people, and you hope that these things coincide.
I'm here today to warn you: I want you to watch out for the adversary. Guard yourself from any spirit of entitlement. Restrain any and all subtle temptation to gain attention or to find ways to promote yourself.
When I hear someone, instantaneously, I'm like, 'Who's singing?' You're giving people so much of yourself, and my voice is the most natural, distinctive tool I have. It's up to me to express myself on a wider scale than just writing vocal melodies and lyrics.
If you're chained to a computer all day, you're not using up much energy, even if you drag yourself to the gym a couple of days a week. And to make matters worse for me, I've had a secondary career right along with my romance writing - cookbook author, under my real name, Ruth Glick.
It can be a detriment to yourself to not be working, but at the same time, you want to hold true to what you're wanting to be working on.
Leadership is a mindset in action. So don't wait for the title. Leadership isn't something that anyone can give you - you have to earn it and claim it for yourself.
There's no unemployment insurance if you don't have a job in wrestling. You really have to be committed, to have a love and a passion for the sport, a belief in yourself that you can do it.
