My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world. I always had a mind for characters and dialogue, and my head was filled with that stuff, so it seemed like a good place to start.
I think that if I had grown up and had been in show business and the movies twenty five, thirty years earlier, I think I would have made a lot more musical movies.
Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama; fathers and sons, martyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings - stories that taught us of the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility.
We were very happy when a South African court, which had previously ruled against us, took another look and decided that this material was not obscene and allowed it into the country.
As I wrote, I found that Aibileen had some things to say that really weren't in her character. She was older, soft-spoken, and she started showing some attitude.
She did not admire him any more than she had. It was merely that she considered him the Lesser of two evils.
By 1760, the Nantucketers had virtually exterminated the local whale population.
I always loved singing, but I thought it was like drawing - just something you do in your own little corner to calm yourself down. But when my friend, the French songwriter Etienne Daho, listened to my songs, he was so moved that told me that I had to do a demo, share them with the world.
I started doing sculpture in 1959. I had no commissions then. They were painted, similar in style to the paintings... At a certain point, I decided I didn't want an edge between two colors, I wanted color differences in literal space.
Had the car companies continued to do generation two, generation three, generation four of the EV-1, we'd be looking at a spectacular car today.
For a long time, I had been very secretive about a lot of the things I'd been through personally, and a lot of that is purposeful. My fan base, for the large part, is the younger generation. They're like, 'I want to know everything! I want to know it all!'
I'd horsewhip you if I had a horse.
One of the things I loved about working on 'Portal' was that we'd get emails from people saying, 'I love to play first-person shooters but my girlfriend won't play them with me. But I got her to play 'Portal' and she had a blast.'
I've started to show the consistency in majors I had in regular tournaments back in 1998-2000 when I was contending nearly every week.
M dad was a boxer, so he had this fierce, physical presence.
I enjoyed 'Roswell' a lot, and I had a lot of fun playing Jim Valenti. I had never done a show that lasted as long as that - that one lasted three years.
I have always had this mentality because I hated to break anything on the car.
I had a lot of racism growing up where I grew up. Bullied at school. It definitely encouraged me. It's like battle wounds - you come out the other side, and it just makes you tougher.
But we were really locked in to that kind of format, and as the '90s wore on, it became for me more solidified, in that sense that there weren't as many of those magical shows that were just magic all the way through as there had been in earlier years.
I always had the dream of flying, and the cheapest way is to become a skydiver.
When I started Teach For America, I wasn't trying to come up with an idea that would change the world. I was trying to solve a problem much closer to home: I was a senior in college, and I had no idea what I was going to do with my life!
It was the biggest inflation and the most sustained inflation that the United States had ever had.
When I was about to break a world record and become well known, my mother used to say that for her the important thing was for me to become a doctor - a career which had not been possible in her generation and in her society. Sport was something to be set aside.
Republican isolationists had certainly tied the hands of every U.S. president, year after year - berating Franklin Roosevelt in particular and his attempts to ready the nation for inevitable attack.
I don't ever remember a single day of hopelessness. I knew from the history of the labor movement, especially of the black people, that it was an undertaking of great trial. That, live or die, I had to stick with it, and we had to win.
You can be an idiot and survive because you just go to McDonalds for your food, and you go to work and do some sort of inane job, which is nobody taking any responsibility - it's always up the line - and then you watch the Super Bowl, and that's it. But in the old days, you really had to know how your world works. You don't need that anymore.
When I came out, and for many years afterwards, it had become a habit for me to sit and read and read and read, like an obsession. I would take 20 books, and not come out until I'd finished them. It took me a while to change that habit.
I don't get bothered about statistics. If somebody had pointed out to me the odds of my being a working actress getting paid for what she does, I probably would have quit early in the game.
I've always had an interest in business, and my interest in business has really expanded over the years.
My grandmother and I would go see movies, and we'd come back to the apartment - we had a one-room apartment in Hollywood - and I would kind of lock myself in this little dressing room area with a cracked mirror on the door and act out what I had just seen.
I kind of just lucked into and fell into the other profession. It was really just an outgrowth of the fact that when I was in art school, I had no money whatsoever.
I have experienced some amazing food! Yet when I think about the most luxurious and exquisite meals I have had, visions of simple food made from a few natural ingredients are what most excite me.
And my parents' separation was tricky. But my mum had always been really honest with me, and treated me like an adult even when I was really young, so I knew they hadn't been getting on.
We have been in the territories since 1967. In 2002, we had sometimes three or four suicide attacks every day. We came to the conclusion that it can't continue like that.
We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it.
After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were ready for this fusion of classical and jazz.
