I had a major surgery, a major abdominal surgery, and a mass was removed from my pelvic area, and I do have some more recovery to do. But everything seems to be fine.
Both my mother and my father grew up in Asia, in a time of political instability. They'd earned college degrees before setting foot in the States but had to work menial jobs early on in order to make ends meet.
I was quite fearless as a kid. But I've had to realize I'm not invincible. That's what breaking your back does. It makes you grow up and reassess life.
People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end - whether we've had direct experience or not - there's part of you that knows there's absolutely no more piercing betrayal. People are undone by it.
I didn't like the '60s because it was too important what people who had nothing to do with the war thought about it.
My father's father wrote for a Philadelphia newspaper and aspired to be a playwright. We had in our house a couple of crazy unproduced plays that he had written. For the one creative writing class I took in my life, I didn't do any writing - I decided that I would plagiarize his terrible play to not fail the class.
Winning the European Championship was a great thing for me, and I understood what it was to win a major trophy and what I had been missing.
The idea of a piece of literature as a vessel that could contain your life and lived after you had died and been forgotten struck me as akin to artificial intelligence.
After so many surgeries, I had to modify my game. I know what I can and can't do in order to keep performing for a long period of time.
When I was a kid, there was always food to be had on the street in Jerusalem, but anything above a falafel stand was mediocre or worse.
We were fortunate enough to have several good books detailing the camps and the women. Some were by the survivors. I also got to talk to some of the women who had been in the camp, survivors.
None of the standard high school science courses made much of an impression on me, but I did enjoy the Advanced Placement Chemistry course I took in my senior year. This course had only eleven students and was taught by a rarity for our school, an exchange teacher from England, Mr. Leslie Sturges.
I experimented with different roles, but they didn't work, despite being fantastic films like 'Naa Autograph,' 'Sambo Siva Sambo,' 'Neninthe'... etc. I was very satisfied doing those roles. Had those films worked for me, I perhaps would not have tried anything different further. I like to experiment once in a while if it works.
When I was five years old, my parents gave me a magic chest. I learned to cast spells, although of a childish kind, before I had learned to read and write.
I couldn't make it on the swimming team in high school. In fact, I got thrown off the swimming team and was forced to audition for the school play because they had at the audition about 35 girls show up and no boys, so my swimming coach suggested that I might be able to do the drama department more good than I was doing the swimming team.
I wasn't as used to the new dumb questions, so when men I had once thought of as wise daddies now asked me 'How do you write?' I did not try and spill red wine in their suede pants. I would just smile and say, 'On a typewriter in the mornings when there's nothing else to do.'
I've never boxed before in my life. I've had one day's training at a boxing gym, and it's an incredibly difficult sport.
As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.
The reason I know about 'Tomb Raider' is from when I was researching 'Elephant.' It was 1999, and I was trying to research the Columbine-massacre kids, and they had played video games, and I, at the time, had never really seen one. It was a world I didn't know.
I had a breakdown after making 'Atonement.'
I've always said to people that auteurism is nice, but it's hypothetical, and gradually you learn how much or how little influence different directors had.
I was always the new kid in school, I'm the kid from a broken family, I'm the kid who had no dad showing up at the father-son stuff, I'm the kid that was using food stamps at the grocery store.
I just worked with Sofia Coppola and that was amazing. I learned so much from her. I can't even describe how much fun I had.
When I was a kid, I had this idea that I would have a beard when I got older. I thought it'd be nice to rub my chin.
I had one girl tell me last night that I'm the greatest thing ever, that she wants to aspire to be me. Just stuff like, 'You're my idol. I love you.' It's awesome. It's what it's all about.
I don't sing now, because I had polio when I was 15, bulbar polio. This was when the epidemic was happening. And I was lucky that it didn't affect my lungs or my legs. It went to my face and kind of paralyzed my vocal chords, and I wasn't able to sing. And they said I was very lucky that I would get over it, which I did.
Wagner's philosophy had absolutely nothing to do with Bruckner. Bruckner hadn't written a single word against Jews. Wagner's book on the Jews was one of the most infamous books of the 19th century.
One time, I had a guy, when I was performing at Caesar's Palace, and during the course of the show, I offered him an anniversary gift for him and his wife, and it was her watch wrapped in a little package.
Before I was 5, I did have a lot of time on my hands. I had no job and really no career, and I spent an awful lot of time listening to records. It was more the classical ones, really - Prokofiev, and I think there was some Mozart in there, and more impressionistic composers like Delius.
I'm the non-executive chairman of nine or so major companies, and on the nine companies, it's a little trying because you jump from one industry to another, as the case might be. But one had the reasonable knowledge of those nine activities, and it's been an exciting job.
We even had a different word for Christmas in my language, Bengali: Baradin, which literally meant 'big day.'
Because I had my family, I felt like I could be a bird and fly and experience and do. Because I had roots somewhere, I knew that they would love me no matter what, and I could always go back home and they were going to love me.
I had very big lips growing up, so my brother started to call me Scooter Fish because he decided a scooter fish has big lips.
I'm among the first girls ever to play Little League baseball, and to my knowledge, the very first in western Illinois. It was 1976, and I was a nine-year-old tomboy whose older brothers had played.
Well, I think one of the problems with 'Birds of Prey' was there were too many cooks in that kitchen. The studio, the producers, the network, all had very different visions of what that should be. They should have just let Laeta Kalogridis control that. Instead they decided to try to get their hands in the mix.
All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with 'On the Road' and 'The Dharma Bums', I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse.
