Multitasking, throughput, efficiency - these are excellent machine concepts, useful in the design of computer systems. But are they principles that nurture human thought and imagination?
I don't find the technology threatening. A lot of people my age, my generation, find it difficult to immerse themselves. But I would never preclude the idea of using any technology if I thought it suited the end result.
I've always thought of myself as a role model even before being a 'celebrity.' I've always been doing charity work and volunteering in the community since I was 8, so when you do that, I think you just assume that role when you put yourself out there.
With 'Pariah,' at the time, I had just come out. I had a coming out experience, and I was writing about it, transposing my experience as an adult: What would it have been like if I had been a teenager in Brooklyn? The funny thing was people thought I was from Brooklyn. I had to be like, 'No, I'm from Nashville.'
One of the great cosmic laws, I think, is that whatever we hold in our thought will come true in our experience. When we hold something, anything, in our thought, then somehow coincidence leads us in the direction that we've been wishing to lead ourselves.
A huge segment of the country has always felt overtaxed. In 1938, when taxes were roughly 17% of income, a 'Fortune' survey found that nearly half of all Americans thought they paid too much relative to what they got in return.
My dad was very excited about me doing 'Laguna Beach,' and he thought it was a great opportunity. My mom, however, living in Chicago, was a little nervous. I mean she had some reservations about MTV. I think there was a point in my life where I wasn't even allowed to watch MTV!
I thought boxing was stupid.
My daughter, Grace, was not killed by a gun. She died suddenly at age 5 from a virulent form of strep. As I stood stunned in a church at her memorial, one of the hardest things I heard someone say was, 'I'm going to go home and hug my child a little tighter.' 'Well, good for you,' I thought. 'I'm going to go home and scream.'
I remember, after graduating high school, I got a part in a play with the Washington Shakespeare Festival - a little part. But I remember thinking this would be a great way of making a living... to be an actor. I never really thought I'd make a lot of money at it.
Dancing in speakeasies was a job, and none of us knew for sure who were gangsters. No one told us, so how could we know? My mother used to come and take me home. We thought nothing of walking home together at two in the morning.
Well, actually, the Second City thing came about because I was taking a few improv classes there. I thought that the improv classes would help with my wrestling career, which it has.
What I view life like is about energy. Everything is about energy - everything. We physically are little units of electrical energy, and we vibrate and project electromagnetic thought.
There is one confrontation scene toward the end of the picture. In the middle of the scene, I thought, That's Sean Connery! I don't know how else to describe Sean Connery. I still feel that way.
I thought it would be easy. I thought it'd take me one year to be Salma Hayek.
I saw these new kinds of stores: the Body Shop, the Sock Shop, and I thought to myself, 'I can do that.'
As a kid, I saw that Dad lost a lot of money in casinos, and I didn't understand that. I thought this must be a great business. At the same time, I saw when I was with him - and I was with him a lot of the time - that this was a really cool business, and it was fun and glamorous.
I was always an Olsen. I never thought of myself as a Brady. I never actually wanted to be a Brady. I always preferred my own family to the Bradys.
Disco music in the '70s was just a call to go wild and party and dance with no thought or conscience or regard for tomorrow.
I did one or two plays at school. Once I played a tree, so I never thought I would be a good actor.
School bored me. Being educated and being intelligent are two different things. I thought I was smart enough. And I wanted to be an entertainer. I stopped going to school as a way of saying I was mature, a way of saying I was going to choose who I was going to become.
Even when I was at 'SNL,' I didn't do impersonations. I always wanted to be the kind of person who could do them - I always thought they were the coolest thing on the show - but I didn't have any experience.
I love the first two X-Men movies because I thought that Bryan Singer did such a great job. He elevated that whole genre. He's a very talented director.
It's so fun to play a villain. I get to tap into a side of myself I thought I never had.
The biggest problem is that people have stopped being critical about the role of the computer in their lives. These machines went from being feared as Big Brother surrogates to being thought of as metaphors for liberty and individual freedom.
When I was 15, if anything, I thought I was going to be a Delta bluesman, which is so ridiculous.
I thought art was dead rabbits hanging by their feet on a wall. I went to Italy and saw all the religious paintings, and they didn't move me all that much. Then someone invited me to see this van Gogh exhibit at the Rosenberg Gallery in San Francisco.
I was one of those kids who thought I could be the president of England when I grew up if I wanted to. Then I started acting and realized life is hard, and people are mean. And there's no president of England, and I'm not British.
Education was a given, only because of the way I was raised. Truth be told, I thought, at 15 years old, I should go and get a record deal and drop out of school, and my parents would have had none of that. I'm grateful now that my parents were pushing me in that way, because I wasn't mature enough on so many levels to do that.
All my life, I've been sort of a professional optimist, full of good cheer about matters political and journalistic. I always thought I'd get older and become an unnaturally cheerful old fart. But it's not happening.
Disney had such a hold on the mind of America-they were Adolf Hitler. The whole country thought Disney was some sort of god and that animation was some sort of pure thing for children.
I remember, my freshman year of college, sitting in my TV room at the end of my dorm hallway with one other girl watching the premiere of 'Beverly Hills, 90210.' And then, a year later, walking into a room packed with college students watching '90210,' and I thought, 'I wonder what it must be like to be part of a phenomenon like that.'
Housework is the only activity at which men are allowed to be consistently inept because they are thought to be so competent at everything else.
I heard my new team-mates saying, 'We have got to hope that we don't go down.' I thought to myself, 'What kind of a mentality is that?'
When the music business failed to embrace the Internet, I thought it was game, set and match for the industry, and I quit.
In economic terms, we've always thought of work as a disutility - as something you do to get something else. Now it's increasingly a utility - something that's valuable and worthy in its own right.
