It used to be that you had to make female TV characters perfect so no one would be offended by your 'portrayal' of women. Even when I started out on 'The Office' eight years ago, we could write our male characters funny and flawed, but not the women. And now, thankfully, it's completely different.
In Athens I was 17 and I didn't have any expectations. I was just swimming fast and racing everybody. I didn't have the joy after my races in 2007. I didn't want to go to Beijing. I had to for sponsors.
I come from a family of writers. My mom had been a writer, nonfiction books, and her mother was a playwright in the 1930s and '40s. And my twin brother, Alexi, is a writer on 'The Following.'
I grew up in a one-parent family. I worked my way through college, I had very average grades and I was very average looking, but I've lived a remarkable life only because I believed I could.
Not only did I avoid speaking of Salinger; I resisted thinking about him. I did not reread his letters to me. The experience had been too painful.
I never had the high-paying job or the company car. It took me over a decade to pay off my student loans. I never had to worry about where to dock my yacht to reduce my taxes.
Yeah, you got the family dog and the white picket fence, and you just think that's all there is. Some of us had to grow up in poverty-stricken urban neighborhoods, and we just had to adapt to our environment. I know that it's wrong. But people act like it's some crazy thing they never heard of. They don't know.
In 1994 the U.S. Court of Appeals decided in the case of Oliver North to permit the release of grand jury evidence, because it had already been so thoroughly leaked.
I'm a natural blonde. But when I started acting, I would go to auditions and they didn't know where to put me because I was voluptuous and had the accent, but I had blonde hair. It was ignorance: they thought every Latin person looks like Salma Hayek.
I enjoy doing digital work. I enjoy sculpting digitally. I've had my digital sculptures on covers of the top digital magazines.
I had to learn a lot about myself during the situation with my brain tumor.
In Russia we had to have special visas in our passports, and when we had to show our passports at the Kremlin gates, we realized that, Oh my God, we're actually playing in THE Kremlin!
We had, after all, no other recourse to protect ourselves, no other document, let's say, than the Monroe Doctrine. So that could be cited as a cause for intervention if and when it might become necessary.
In 1795, I sent him another letter, telling him, that danger still stood before us, and that the truth of what I had written in 1792 was to be proved by 12 men.
I was kosher until I had my Bar Mitzvah, and I parlayed officially becoming a man into telling my father I wanted to eat cheeseburgers.
I swear if I had to do this over again, I would just do the paintings and never show them.
You know, maybe I was just born in the wrong time, but I love all things romantic. Puffy understands that. For my last birthday, he covered my hotel room floor with rose petals and had flowers and candles all over the room.
The ballets you do make you into the final product you are. And I had extraordinary partners.
Yes, I have had difficult times on court and at certain tournaments but you need to forget about it and go forward because that's the way it works in our world.
Purcell is a composer who had a formative influence on British music - even The Who now cite him as an influence. There's an intense, dirty harmony, but there's a Louis XIV kind of elan and style, too. He had the melancholy DNA of our national folk heritage.
After my mother died, I found, a little book of hers which recorded everything I had ever done, how I had done it, and how proud she was of her son Conrad.
My coach, Liang Chow, had one rule while I was training for the 2008 Olympics: no skiing. I could do anything I wanted outside the gym, he said, except ski.
My temper is of a recluse and contemplative cast; had it been otherwise, I should, perhaps, on some former occasions, have entered into the active concerns of the world and not have been connected with it merely as a writer of books.
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
At least Obama was half-way honest about how much he was going to spend on health care. He had it at $600 billion. And the real number... is $1.2 trillion.
I think the writers of 'Community' have moved on from my character. I'm pretty sure. I would love to go back on. I had a really good time and I really liked that character, but I don't think it's going to happen.
Well, all I can say is thank goodness I had 15 years of theater before ever I did film roles. You build technique that you can rely on.
I had bought a farm, was trying to rebuild my life and just looking to be left alone. Then I get charged with perjury strictly for political purposes.
He gave to misery (all he had) a tear.
I was always a clown. In the eighth grade I won a city speech contest by doing an Eddie Murphy routine. I'm no good at public speaking, but if I can assume a role and speak as that person, then I'm fine. When I had to give a book report, I always did it in character.
One of the speakers asked how many women had been harassed or abused sexually in their life? There were thousands of women in the audience, and almost every one of them raised her hand.
By the mid 1970s, the great downtown bookstores had begun to disappear as their customers migrated from city to suburb where population density was too thin to support major backlist retailers.
We had extremely democratic town councils in medieval Italy which knew the value of working together, and every now and then, down the centuries, this spirit returns.
I feel blessed that I had an opportunity to be in the Big Ten for four years as a player and be in the Big Ten as a coach for eight years. To get 12 years in a conference like the Big Ten - it's a first-class league with great towns and great fans.
I don't remember my mother ever playing with me. And she was a perfectly good mother. But she had to do the laundry and clean the house and do the grocery shopping.
My father ran London Films. He made films like 'The Red Shoes,' 'The Third Man.' And he had had a long career in the film business, which was bifurcated with a career in intelligence. He had to deal with gangsters, and sometimes he would take me with him. Also, I went to school with their children.
