I don't really have hobbies. I paint. I write. I direct videos. I take photos. I'm a creative person. A normal day for me is doing all of those things. Sometimes I stay up until 5 A.M. writing a song because I make music. It's the same with writing.
There are days when I should be writing, and I am so tired that I can't. And the fatigue also affects my emotions, making me not even care about writing. There are days when I wake up so angry I can barely speak, and also days when I am so sad.
Sometimes in this country, we don't focus a lot on people's experience and their resume. Mitt Romney would be the most experienced executive to be nominated since 1952. The fundamental task for the next president is going to be fixing things, cleaning things up, being a turnaround artist, if you will.
If you desecrate a white grave, you wind up sitting in prison. But desecrate an Indian grave, and you get a Ph.D.
Believing that no one is better than the other. You know I grew up in the South. My senior year there was a very big racial tension.
Every writer is going to end up drawing from their own experiences in one way or another.
In California, up to 15 percent of wells in agricultural areas exceed a federal contaminant threshold, according to studies.
Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.
I'm always striving to lose weight. And it's not a matter of wanting to be a size 3 again - I brought out my leotards, and a friend thought they were doll clothes. Being heavy isn't good for you. How long can your heart take the strain? So, I never give up, but it's hard.
They've gone to great length to disguise the fact that I'm not in the band, even sending out a photo to promoters with my picture in it which then winds up in some of the ads on the flyers.
We should conceive of ourselves not as rulers of Earth, but as highly powerful, conscious stewards: The Earth is given to us in trust, and we can screw it up or make it work well and sustainably.
Growing up, Michael Jordan was my Olympic hero.
I grew up in Colorado and spent my summers in Montana as a ranch hand.
What I love about how my career has gone up to this point is that I've always, always put my head down on my pillow at night, and I've been able to say that I've done, honestly, what I've felt like I wanted to do. And that's really all you can hope for in everything you do.
It was rehearsing in the studio, at which point they were setting up the sound, and once we'd got the thing together they'd actually record it, without us knowing sometimes!
Growing up, I always thought of Detroit as a basketball town because of the Pistons, but everyone says it's really, at its core, a football town.
How prone poor Humanity is to dam up the minutest remnants of its freedom, and build an artificial roof to prevent it looking up to the clear blue sky.
I doing casual labor by the day. They wouldn't pay you until the next morning. There was a bar that would cash your check if you bought a beer first. A lot of guys never left until they'd drunk up all their money.
At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer.
Literature can allow us to experience the best side of humankind, where instead of giving up, we struggle desperately in the ruins for love, connection and hope.
Whenever the kindly uncles and aunts came over for a cup of tea and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, it was always the same: an 'authoress', and illustrate my own books.
I grew up in Perugia, Umbria, in a world outside of fashion, so I didn't learn about it until I was older and moved away. In Milan, the women are really into fashion, and all the big fashion brands are based there, but I don't think they feel pressure to look good all the time.
It's a really big deal to do a spacewalk. It's much riskier than staying indoors. It's complex. It uses up a lot of the precious resources onboard. It uses up oxygen. It uses up carbon dioxide scrubbers.
As a dancer, obviously, we are all inspired by Michael Jackson, and I always looked up to Gene Kelly. He was a bigger version of Fred Astaire, and he was amazing as well.
Like all soul singers, I grew up singing in church but sometimes I would leave early and sit in the car listening to gospel band, The Blind Boys of Alabama. Hearing their lead singer Clarence made me connect the idea of church and show business and see how I could make a career singing music that stirred the soul.
On the television planet, where men make up the tribe, the law of the caveman rules. So, for a woman coming from another world, without experience or cunning, to succeed gradually in gaining control over what is to be taped, what goes out over the air, what is said without censorship, is an epic feat.
I don't want a life without my mom in it, but I'm not someone who curls up in the fetal position and says, 'Mommy, take care of me!' I don't like people catering to me. It feels so awkward and uncomfortable.
I never picked up a guitar as a kid, partly because my dad didn't want the noise in our little back-to-back in Sheffield.
Coming from Haiti and growing up in Brooklyn, there's a lot of European influence when I get dressed up. I wear a lot of fitted suits, elegant cuts; I think it's cool to mash up a lot of different looks.
Professionally, I remember Cronkite as a kid growing up, and more so for me, the importance of Cronkite was not him sitting there at the anchor desk, but him out there doing things.
It's hard to pass up a pole vault opportunity here in Des Moines. The crowd was so great when I was at the mall and I was pumped up and I thought technically I was on and I figured where else to open up my outdoor season than here.
I remember telling my second-graders the basic 'Metamorphosis' story, saying, like, 'What about - what if a guy woke up one morning and he was a bug? Wouldn't that be weird?' And they loved that. And I think that was the trigger that made me think, like, 'Oh man, here's my audience. They're just a lot shorter than I ever thought they might be.'
I usually wake up at 7, 7:15, without an alarm. I hate the sound of an alarm.
For me, already being part of a single parent household and knowing it was just me and my mom, you'd would wake up times and hope that the next day you'd be able to be alongside your mother because she was out trying to make sure that I was taken care of. But all I cared about was her being home.
If I could stomach the awful part of being a veterinarian, which involves sticking your hand up animals' behinds, I would be a vet.
You should have a fund of knowledge of something and out of that you make up you mind.
