Growing up, my dolls were doctors and on secret missions. I had Barbie Goes Rambo.
Ever since the Crusades, when Christians from western Europe were fighting holy wars against Muslims in the near east, western people have often perceived Islam as a violent and intolerant faith - even though when this prejudice took root Islam had a better record of tolerance than Christianity.
Everybody had their fans and they were fans of all of them.
At Julliard we had some voice classes. It was really just so you could carry a tune. It always just helps with your speaking voice also, when you connect your diaphragm and your breath.
It's all about hustling, whether it's in Boston or the film industry. I've been hustling my entire life - acting my way into trouble and acting my way back out again. I'm just fortunate to have had the opportunity to apply it in a different direction.
When I was 13, I had these episodes where I could just see the world without any words attached to it, without any associations. It was a little bit spooky. A lot of people might have even thought it was pathological. I thought it was interesting.
Had I been in Toronto, I would certainly have been killed in this attack. In the room where I normally sleep, the flames and the smoke and the soot is such that the gases would have killed me.
I didn't know initially whether I'd like doing TV and whether I'd be able to work with other people. I've always done my own thing. I've never put myself into that situation, but it's the most fun I've had in years.
My grandmother was probably the first person who I thought was beautiful. She was incredibly stylish, she had big hair, big cars. I was probably 3 years old, but she was like a cartoon character.
I was just a kid in 1987 when I heard of the Pixies, the year after I graduated high school. But I had my band together, and my best friend at the time, Corey Hickock, who was the guitar player in the band that would become STP, Mighty Joe Young, turned me on to the Pixies.
I think the next thing I publish will be for children, but I don't really want to be held to that because I also know what my next book for adults will be, and I really like that, too, so it depends. I've always had more than one thing going.
I had no interest in cinema until I was 24 years old. My friends had posters of their favourite stars in their houses, but I was far from a film buff - very detached from films.
Are you going to cater to the whims and prejudices of people? We draw out from other people our own thought. If, when you go out to organize, you go with a broad spirit, you will create and call out breadth and toleration. You had better organize one woman on a broad platform than 10,000 on a narrow platform of intolerance and bigotry.
I had the most fantastic time filming 'Downton.'
As I was leaving graduate school in 1974, I was recruited to join a fledgling SETI project at the Hat Creek Observatory in California, mainly because I knew how to program an ancient PDP8/S computer that had been donated to the project.
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
I had given thought to acting, but I never really had a good enough opportunity or a character who made sense and paralleled my life a little bit. I feel like I'm one of the poster boys for a bad guy in a movie. I feel like I'm a good person to play a bad guy in a movie. I can say that.
I had flops, I had success.
I was a 'runaway girl' from France who married an American and moved to New York City. I'm not sure I would have continued as an artist had I remained in Paris because of the family setup.
I was a super once - an extra - in 'Die Fledermaus,' and was seated within three feet of Placido Domingo. I had never heard a voice of that beauty so close up. It felt as if an electric shock were running through me.
I learned how to lend money by cleaning up the messes of others who had made loans before me.
Sex is not a subject in my photographs, or would only be if it had to do with romance, sometimes vulnerability. The photographs are quite clearly about happiness, or search for happiness.
I have a real problem now when I go onto Netflix: it takes me a half hour to pick something out. They've got to figure something out, whether it's their algorithm... Maybe if they had it curated like a video store: 'Will Ferrell recommends this movie' or 'Jennifer Lawrence recommends these 10 movies.'
'Spider-Man' was the best time of my life. I was there with my best friend. We shot in Atlanta. We shot every day and just had an absolute blast. 'Avengers' was crazy because you're on set every day with actors I never dreamed I would work with. I'm as much a fan as anyone else.
For a decade, I had been studying a transparent worm, the C. elegans. I immediately thought, if you could put the G.F.P. gene into C. elegans, you'd then be able to see biological processes in live animals. Until then, we had to kill them and prepare their tissues chemically to visualize proteins or active genes within cells.
I always knew I had a relationship with God. But I wasn't sure God had a relationship with me.
Celebrity was fun, and I had a good time.
I was fortunate that I was an only child. I had two parents who I really cared about, and they cared about me, so I got off to a good start.
Jeffrey Zeldman had an astonishing ability to craft a seductive coolness using educated references, dry humor, and retro/organic imagery.
In a way, my father was lucky. He had a hunch that his vision of the National Gallery would interest other collectors and persuade them to come in with him, and that hunch proved to be right.
I've got quite an old-fashioned figure. Back in the Sixties, girls had boobs, a tummy and wide hips, and bigger thighs as well. I think that's sexy - to me, that's what a woman looks like. I've got love handles - sometimes they're passion handles! I'm built for comfort, not for speed, and I like that about myself.
A lot of Polish and Russian Jews had this experience: they would emigrate, thinking they were on their way to New York. Then their captains would stop in Dublin and say, 'Everybody off.' They would leave, and by the time they discovered they weren't in America, they didn't have enough money to continue.
So many of the great thought leaders that have shaped economics - Gary Becker, Milton Friedman - what an unbelievable success story they've had in their field.
'A League of Their Own' had some special meaning for me, I guess - it's about women joining together and being empowered, but also about sisters sticking together even when there's drama and struggles. I'm really close to my two sisters and my brother, so I liked that about it.
Marie Stopes had established the first birth control clinic in Britain; the whole question of informing women, especially those who were poor, about methods of contraception, began to be discussed.
Even the earliest cave paintings in France and Spain had natural motion.
