My dad got a job in a factory in Philadelphia, so I was raised in Germantown in a sort of a barracks for soldiers. They had housing for temporary housing. And then my parents saved money and bought a little house in South Jersey, built on a swamp.
I can't tell you how lucky I feel. I've gotten to work Peter Facinelli 'American Odyssey,' and I got to do 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2' - which really gave me such a tremendous amount of pride and patriotism, and it was very close to my heart. I've really had such great support, so many great teachers, and so many wonderful people surrounding me.
It was really weird dealing with the media. I had no idea how to handle it.
Feminists were psyched that I had armpit hair.
World War II had been such a tremendous success story for this country that the political and military leadership began to assume that they would prevail simply because of who they were. We were like the British at the turn of the 19th century.
I've had many of my books optioned.
I had given up magic, because it had reached a state of perfection. I felt that I was able to transform men into animals. I did not make use of this capability, because I believed I could not justify an intervention of this kind in the life of another person.
In real life, I first started sleep walking in high school because that was when this concept of getting into college first appeared. I had this moment of, 'Oh! This is going to affect the rest of my life.'
A bad liver is to a Frenchman what a nervous breakdown is to an American. Everyone has had one and everyone wants to talk about it.
The tree was evidently aged, from the size of its stem. It was about six feet high, the branches came out from the stem in a regular and symmetrical manner, and it had all the appearance of a tree in miniature.
If malice or envy were tangible and had a shape, it would be the shape of a boomerang.
Films were never in my budget. Didn't occur to me till much later. I hoped for a long, good life, which I've had and I'm having as an actor. I didn't expect the rest.
Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.
But when I look at the fact that today is 1,000 days that we have not had a budget for the United States of America, you know, the House, one of the things we did, we passed a budget last year. But that is still sitting over there at the Senate. And so we have got to get this country back on track.
I was married for 30 years. Isn't that enough? I've had my share of dirty underwear on the floor.
I used to think Cape Wind was a great idea. That was when Ted Kennedy was alive and railing about how he might spill his Chivas if he had to keep maneuvering the Mya around all those noisy seagull-murdering wind turbines. Anything Ted Kennedy was against, I was for.
I never had the chutzpah to just come to L.A. and make it. I didn't have that confidence. I'm always surprised when I get a job.
My mother had to send me to the movies with my birth certificate, so that I wouldn't have to pay the extra fifty cents that the adults had to pay.
I had lost a clear sense of the vision and values instilled in me as a child and was no longer driven by any mission or passion. I made the difficult decision to pull back from the noise of my life and reinvent the way I was living and leading.
I wasn't really interested in doing anything except going from pilot season to pilot season and sowing my oats in the months between and telling my agency to stop sending me movie scripts, because they'd pile up in my house and make me feel guilty because I had to read them.
'Deal or No Deal' works nicely with my ADD/ADHD symptoms. I show up, meet the contestants, and move around the set. I'm not stuck behind a pedestal reading trivia questions. I've always had problems sitting still and listening for long periods of time. The show spares me these challenges. I can live in the moment. It's like a standup act.
In college I had a weekend gig at a restaurant, a solo thing that was the best practice I could have ever had. That's where I learned to coordinate my singing and my piano playing.
I had been working for eight years and all I had to show for it was this horrible debt. At one point we had the bailiff at the door.
I was a Scout years ago, before the movement started, when my father took me fishing, camping and hunting. Then I was sorry that more girls could not have what I had. When I learned of the movement, I thought, here is what I always wanted other girls to have.
We had built up a team in Edmonton that really knew who each other was from a personal standpoint and from a professional standpoint. Our nucleus had stayed together for a long time.
I was in a very multi-racial, multi-cultural schooling system. I had a really delightful childhood. I was a jock. I became a very competitive swimmer in Zimbabwe. I was a swimmer, a tennis player, a hockey player. Then, when I was 13, I joined a Children's Performing Arts workshop in Zimbabwe.
There are a lot of myths about my injuries. They say I have broken every bone in my body. Not true. But I have broken 35 bones. I had surgery 14 times to pin and plate. I shattered my pelvis. I forget all of the things that have broke.
When I first came to America, you know, I would look at the newsstands and see the women on the magazine covers. I had never seen anyone smile the way these girls smile! It's like they have nothing to worry about!
Certainly in my youth there was lots of singing, lots of storytelling, and whenever we went to a party, you had to do a party piece, like sing songs, recite poems, or tell stories. That sort of narrative musical culture was my upbringing.
I've never had any interest at all in being a journalist or writing some sort of historically accurate autobiography.
I've had dogs all my life. I'm a huge animal lover, especially dogs, so that's one of the hardest things about being away all the time. I really miss them, but my mum does a really good job looking after then when I'm gone.
I've never had as much success as when I say to myself, 'I get that. I know what the feelings that that character would be going through would be like. I can feel a through line from beginning to end.'
I started to write a new editor not too long ago and had it about half done after two days.
I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.
I come from a family of teasers myself. My grandfather was from Liverpool, and he had a dry sense of humor, and he would tease us terribly. My brother Beau was so skilled in his teasing that he could get a rise out of me by simply pointing at me.
I've never really been aware of what is said about me, whether it's positive or negative. I ignore it. I've always had the mind-set: 'No one can challenge me better than myself.'
