I'm a comic, and I'm supposed to outrage and make people laugh, Part of makin' people laugh is to shake up their thinkin'. That's what I came here to do.
Perhaps the most startling reversal of tradition came in the case of Lefty Grove. He shattered the cruel slanders which have always followed lefthanders.
I don't really believe in elegance. Ever since I first came to France many years ago to do the Chambre Syndicale course, I always felt I was somehow lacking, first of all being British - obviously a disaster! But I was also puzzled with this idea that you have to tie your Hermes scarf just right, or you can only wear black.
In August of 2011, Steve Jobs, the tech icon who disrupted a string of traditional industries, called me and told me he thought he'd figured out a way to revolutionize TV. He invited me to come see it at Apple in a few months, but he died just six weeks later, and that meeting never came to pass.
I would say I've actually done a lot more comedy than I've done drama. It's weird the way that worked out, because when I came out of theater school I took myself way too seriously, so it's kind of ironic that I ended up sort of going down the comedy path.
With 'Honeymoon,' it was so intimate, and we literally shot it in something like 20, 24 days. Everything was very rapid and very fast, and so all of us submerged into the deep end and only really came up for air once we had wrapped.
My father came from nothing, so he believed that people could do anything if they worked hard enough. I think he liked that I chose to be an actor. Both he and my mom were totally supportive.
I'm sorry, but in my generation and where I came from, only sailors got tattoos. Not ladies.
When I came out, I found I hadn't been born with the right genes. It's quite brutal. If you're beautiful and you have the right genes, then the gay scene is a place where you can be worshipped. But if you don't, it's a different ball of wax.
I went into broadcast journalism. I loved every class I took, I just got anxious because I came to the realization that you're groomed in high school to get good SAT scores to get into a good college or else you're done for.
I think in the wake of Katrina, the Coast Guard may well have been the only entity or agency that came out of that exercise free of fault and free of blame.
Years ago, when my attempts at a writing career came to a complete stand-still, I applied to the Los Angeles Police Department. This might seem odd for a liberal woman who once went to UC Santa Cruz, but I've always had a powerful fascination with crime and serious interest in finding different ways to contend with it.
The 'Story of Silent Night', which was given to me one Christmas when I was six - it was the story of a down and out composer who had no ideas left, and it was Christmas, and he came up with the hymn 'Silent Night.'
I was 10 years old when I first heard Ginuwine. I remember being at a friend's house, and the music video came on. I was just like, 'What is that?' I was just kind of drawn from there.
I sort of came from a big family - eight kids - and I guess I always, more than most people, really revel in privacy and solitude sometimes.
I have friends who are black whose families opened their arms to them when they came out; I have friends who were white where they were rejected.
I wanted to tell my story and where I came from and my background, because it was not easy.
At Christmas, I am always struck by how the spirit of togetherness lies also at the heart of the Christmas story. A young mother and a dutiful father with their baby were joined by poor shepherds and visitors from afar. They came with their gifts to worship the Christ child.
When I came to the United States, I appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show as a 13-year-old, and I played a Mendelssohn Concerto, and it sounded like a talented 13-year-old with a lot of promise. But it did not sound like a finished product.
I grew up in Beaufort, South Carolina, in a six-room farmhouse with a couple of leaning posts to keep it from fallin'. I came up in a time when men were men.
I love ghost stories but kind of left them alone after my teens and came back to it after playing Heathcliff in 'Wuthering Heights' on the radio.
When I first came to Hollywood, I played about as many guys who save the day and get the girl as I played heavies. It's just that heavies are more interesting and last in people's minds.
I was unknown because I came to Washington from the West. I started covering Watergate. Immodestly, I'd say I did it pretty well, in part because it was hard to go wrong.
I was introduced to the Turducken in New Orleans. And it wasn't Thanksgiving. Glenn at the Gourmet Butcher Block brought it by, and I had never heard of it or had seen one, and they put it in the booth, and it smelled so good that I had to taste it. And it was good. Then Thanksgiving came, and we got one in addition to the traditional turkey.
The public/private partnerships are taking various forms in India. It is individuals who are socially oriented are setting up schools. They're setting up colleges. They're setting up universities. They're setting up primary-education schools in the villages, particularly the villages their original families came from.
I loved September 12th. I loved the way - it's awful but, boy, did I love that day when we all came together. All the bickering stopped. All the partisan, cheap partisan warfare stopped.
Though I probably shouldn't admit this, the activities and pursuits in which I've achieved any measure of success are, without exception, activities and pursuits that came easily to me from the beginning.
I can make my living out of Ireland, but the reason I came to London was that I felt I'd gone as far as I could go in Ireland.
When it came to 'Binge,' it wasn't my intention to get on a little soapbox and have a teaching moment. It was more, 'Here are things that have happened to me; here's what I've learned from it. If you'd like to learn from it too, great; if you just like the entertainment aspect, that's fine too.'
'Despacito' started with a melody hook that I had with my guitar only. The beat for this track came after I wrote the lyrics, which I wrote as if I was writing a ballad.
During my first years in the Sierra, I was ever calling on everybody within reach to admire them, but I found no one half warm enough until Emerson came. I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite.
I've had a couple of odd experiences - unexplainable anxiety that came my way through a belief in something... I mean, it sounds cryptic, but... anything for me that turns myself against myself, I stay away from.
My dad is from Panama; he came to the U.S. in 1971. He came to study chemical engineering at the University of Delaware. He thought he would go back, and then he met my mom here. I was born and mostly raised in Delaware.
I'm a Slovak. And when I was growing up, I believed that I was Czechoslovakian because of what Russia did. They came in and took two separate countries - Slovakia and the Czech Republic - put them together as one.
When I came out, I was 68, and I was totally prepared for my career to recede when I spoke to the press for the first time. What happened after that blew me away. I started getting more offers. My career blossomed.
I said: 'I'm throwing in my job, and I'm going to write a book.' Everyone thought: 'She's off her trolley,' and it was quite crazy, really. I'm just lucky that it came off.
