Eileen Ford wanted me to fix my nose and my teeth. I said, Sure, great, but I really had no intention to.
Last year we said, 'Things can't go on like this', and they didn't, they got worse.
John Travolta said he sometimes lets his friends take control of his airplane even though they don't know what they're doing. Then Travolta said he often does the same thing with his career.
Faith is the most important thing in the world to me. It's the greatest strength I've had. It's helped me get through the hard times. You're not going to win every one of your football games. I've always said I'm not going to make football my god. A lot of coaches put so much into coaching football games that they have nothing left.
I see my face in the mirror, and I said, 'No, my ambition is not to be an actor.'
I always said a prayer before I ran, and my prayer was to win. My prayer was that God would allow me to run my best on that day, or better than my best. So whatever the outcome is, I have to be satisfied with it if I know I gave it my best effort.
The painter who is familiar with the nature of the sinews, muscles, and tendons, will know very well, in giving movement to a limb, how many and which sinews cause it; and which muscle, by swelling, causes the contraction of that sinew; and which sinews, expanded into the thinnest cartilage, surround and support the said muscle.
So I said to the gym instructor: 'Can you teach me to do the splits?' He said: 'How flexible are you?' I said: I can't make Tuesdays.'
I had the good fortune of speaking with Orson Wells many decades ago and he said 'Success is primarily luck anyway.' And I have been very lucky. Of course, Orson Wells was enormously talented and brilliant - so who am I to argue with him!
I think President Karzai realizes exactly how important it is to strengthen the fight against corruption in the country now, step up endeavors to stop the drug trade and to deliver better governance. He said as much in his inaugural address.
So, I'm lying on the couch and Laura walks in and I say, 'Free at last,' and she says 'You're free all right, you're free to do the dishes.' So I say, 'You're talking to the former president, baby,' and she said, 'consider this your new domestic policy agenda.'
When you do interviews, you have to talk about yourself - and I like to find out about other people. I am so familiar with everything that I do. I've said it over and over again. I think it is boring.
I was too shy, I think, to sing publicly. It takes a particular kind of person. And when I was young, I was not that person. In the first instance, when a record company said to me, do you want to try and make your record, my first reaction was, no, I'm not worthy - I couldn't possibly, and so on and so forth.
And then she finally said yes. And we have been married, I want you to know, for 51 years.
I've never really been aware of what is said about me, whether it's positive or negative. I ignore it. I've always had the mind-set: 'No one can challenge me better than myself.'
Once when I went over my work with my Washington University professor, the late great Stanley Elkin, he pointed to a passage of mine and said: 'Stop vamping.' It has remained a caution.
My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.
Back home everyone said I didn't have any talent. They might be saying the same thing here but it sounds better in French.
I can't think of an instance at MSNBC where anything I said on the air was influenced by what was going on behind the scenes.
I was in the tennis bubble. I wasn't thinking about the big picture. I didn't notice what they said on television, I wasn't reading any papers. I had a coach and a manager, and they kept me in the bubble.
It has been more wittily than charitably said that hell is paved with good intentions; they have their place in heaven also.
The energy in a comedy is very serious. Somebody said comedy is a tragedy plus time. When you have a tragedy, for example, like this, like, 'We're going to die,' and you have time, like, five hours to die, it becomes a comedy.
I always swore I would never write a book. But I read Clare Balding's and it was really interesting and so prettily written and lovely and not too revealing. I went to her book launch and met her editor who said 'why don't you think about it? You can do it however you want, based on your characters or you.'
George Carlin is kind of my template now because George Carlin before was straight laced regular comic and he had short hair, a tie, suit, nightclub guy. Then he said screw it, let his hair grow, just started telling what he thought was the truth. So that's what I'm trying to do.
He asked my girlfriend if we could come over and sing some of the songs that we had written, which we did. After he heard the songs, he said that he knew someone in the record business by the name of Bob Shad.
I was friends with President Ronald Reagan and he once said to me, 'I don't know how anybody can serve in public office without being an actor.'
I never did say that you can't be a nice guy and win. I said that if I was playing third base and my mother rounded third with the winning run, I'd trip her up.
In regards to your love life, you're just entering into a whole of pain if you talk about it. If you've never said anything, there are no sound bites to haunt you when you're crying into a box of Kleenex after it all goes wrong.
I don't believe in ring rust. I used to believe in ring rust, but I talked to my buddy Dominic Cruz, who's a bantamweight, and he basically said it's a mindset. What you do in between in your time off determines how you're going to look when you come in there.
There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.
Always remember the last words of my grandfather, who said: 'A truck!'
I thank Marc Jacobs so much for giving me the opportunity to design a shoe for Louis Vuitton, but the thing that broke my heart most was when they said, 'You're finished. The shoe's finished.'
I've often said it: that it is seen to be a place of energy, of excitement, of enthusiasm. That there's something about Ireland.
Winning that first game was so important; my mother always said that the first game of the second set was the chance to keep it going if you were ahead or change things if you were behind.
Who said that being Latino is to be a stereotype? Characters are stereotypes when making plans or without shades. I do not believe in the picture or model established in the movies.
The people in Iraq lived essentially good lives. They had brilliant health and education systems. Saddam actually created an incredible infrastructure in a very difficult country, but they were a Mafia family. If you said anything against that regime or that family you would be killed instantly.
