I have never had a current state of mind. My mind changes a great deal. I am very affected by any sorrow or sad thing, and I am very affected by joy and beauty.
I actually had a really nice guitar as a teenager. I took jazz guitar, so my mom bought me this probably $1,600 guitar. But I got really into garage rock and local bands, and I noticed they played really crappy guitars. So I thought, 'Hey, I should get a crappy guitar, too!'
Le Petit is where I cut my teeth with some of my early roles. In 1982, I was in the chorus of 'Gypsy' and soon after I had my first lead as Jamie Lockhart in 'The Robber Bridegroom.'
I thought they loved me, and they would scarcely have known it if I had died. All through our troubles, I was comforted with the thought that the brethren in Maulmain and America were praying for us, and they have never once thought of us.
My family weren't actors, and we didn't know any actors. It wasn't even something I was aware you could do as a job. I thought you had to be a Redgrave or a Barrymore before you were allowed to go to drama school.
I had worked on the markets with my father before going to university, so I possessed an apparent street-smartness, had access to a colourful costermonger vocabulary, and tried passing myself off as a bit of spiv. But my contemporaries saw through me. At heart, they knew I was as bookish and oversensitive as they were.
I couldn't live on the singing at first, so I worked as a cleaner, in a launderette, in a garage, face painting and doing the windows of shops at Christmas, 'cause I had been to art college.
I don't think my mother and father ever had any doubts about what I was to be punished for or not. My parents come from a very strictly defined culture.
We knew that for E.T. to feel real, you had to have some connection to his eyes.
Since 'Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights' came out, I've done a fair amount of public speaking, and the two statistics that always make the audience sit up are that nearly one in three women will have had at least one abortion by menopause and 61 percent of women who have abortions are already mothers.
Many financial and industrial companies have been bailed out with the public's money, but very few of those who had run those companies have been punished for their failures. Yes, the top managers of those companies have lost their jobs - but with a fat pension and mostly with a handsome severance payment.
My mother had very humble beginnings - to put it mildly. Her dad built their home out of timber that he cut down on their land. No heat, no air-conditioning - 'no foolishness,' as he would call it.
I came to New York when I was eighteen years old, and the first audition that I ever went to was this huge cattle call at the Equity building where I had gone two days earlier to sign up - I didn't have an agent or anything. It was for 'Chicago.' There were probably three hundred people there.
Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.
I started working when I was seven, and ever since then I've been saving for an apartment. Even before that I had a little jam jar designated for my apartment money.
Whenever I've had a rough day, I like to pour my frustration into my workouts.
I think on 'ER,' my other long-running show, I had some ideas about what's going on. 'Stargate Universe,' they were kind of secretive too a little bit about what they wanted to do, but I kind of liked working this way. I like the surprises, and I like knowing just enough to work on the character.
I think the biggest adjustment I've made before coming here was going from High A to Double A. I was going in facing pitchers who had more experience and knew how to throw all their stuff for strikes and in hitter's counts, things like that.
I decided at 15 that I didn't want to be one of those artists that gets up and sings love songs they don't mean. I decided that I was going to be me to the fullest extent, that my songs were going to reflect relationships I've had, things I've been through, and even the stuff I'm embarrassed about.
I spent a lot of time thinking that I was some kind of foundling, that I had been a changeling, that I had been found under a bush somewhere, and that I couldn't possibly be kin - but the more I live, the more I feel absolutely like I come out of my family. I'm a sort of strange natural progression.
We had a couple of films that, in the course of working on them, the budget shrank to the point where we couldn't make it. They literally ran the numbers: They took our numbers and the stars' numbers, and when they calculated whether we could make our money back or not, it said no.
I think if everyone had a little more Hodor in them, it'd be a nicer world.
Honestly, I've always had difficulty relaxing, unwinding and going to bed - that kind of stuff.
I had taken on the color of the climate around me and had driven back all the emotion that rose from the Brooklyn streets so that I could belong to the exclusive club of Congress.
The difference between our family and other poor families was that my mother actively chose to be poor. She was highly literate, and she had a college degree, but after my father left, she took the first secretarial job she could find and never looked for other employment again.
Haiti is 10.4-million people, of whom 35 per cent are children under 15. The country has always had great potential - and this is still the case. Our ill fortune has long been a matter of bad governance. And now things have changed.
The theatre training is second to none in Ireland and England. You meet people who haven't had theatre training - it is harder for people who worked in TV to go into theatre than the other way around.
I'm not going to please everyone; not everyone's going to like me. I accepted that a long time ago, and if I had to shed a tear every time I got a hate email, believe me, I'd be severely dehydrated.
When I was auditioning for 'Gotham,' I got a handful of comics from different decades, so I had a perspective - it's been around for 75 years, which is a long time.
I'm lucky to have a fast metabolism, so I haven't had to exercise much.
Once, I optioned a novel and tried to do a screenplay on it, which was great fun, but I was too respectful. I was only 100 pages into the novel and I had about 90 pages of movie script going. I realized I had a lot to learn.
I had to decide if I wanted to be a singer or an actor. I was always singing. I thought if I could be an actor, I could do all of it.
When I was pregnant with my second baby, I almost gained 50 pounds. I enjoyed my pregnancy, but then I had to lose the weight for work.
When I started off in journalism, you knew there was an audience out there and that you wanted people to read what you produced. But it also felt like you had a limited ability to shape the audience, or to acquire an audience, for what you were doing. So you didn't really think too much about that.
The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God, and so he had no hang-ups about souls.
I think people can just make things now. It's kind of what happened with the music industry. Before, a band couldn't afford to go into a nice studio, or if they were going to go into a nice studio, they had to record twenty-five songs in two days. That's not a healthy workflow for anyone.
