Early on, my family really made me love who I was and what I looked like.
The first sign that I'd been unknowingly affected by cooking shows occurred on a Sunday morning when I realized I was talking to myself. I'd been making toast. 'First, we cut our bread,' I whispered. 'Do you know why?' I stopped what I was doing and looked up. 'Let me tell you why.'
Say what you want to say about the rest of his presidency, including his tone-deaf response to Katrina and a war waged in Iraq on false pretenses, Bush connected with Americans in the aftermath of 9/11 because he looked as frail and unforgiving as we felt.
I was born in Puerto Rico - I used to sit in the sun until I looked like a piece of bacon. It's a wonder now that I don't look like an old wallet. I'm a very fortunate person.
The American society around me looked at me and saw Japanese. Then, when I was 19, I went to Japan for the first time. And suddenly - what a shock - I realized I wasn't Japanese; they saw me as American. It was an enormous relief. Now I just appreciate being exactly in the middle.
If I'm at home on my own and the writing isn't going well, I clean my house. And there have been times in the past few years when my house has looked really clean.
The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn - words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details - don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for.
No matter what went down, music was always going to be a part of my life. What ultimately happened is that, over a period of time, I just kind of looked around and when like, 'Wow! I'm actually making a living doing this.'
I looked at my daughter's face and thought, it's lovely to be beautiful but better to be healthy.
It's funny, I lived my first 38 years of my life with maybe one or two people ever saying that I looked like Greg Kinnear. As soon as I get into the entertainment industry, now it's 100 percent of people.
We served Twinkies and Sno Balls at our wedding. We put them on silver trays so they looked elegant - but they were the real deal!
Molly Shannon, for example, is someone I've always really looked up to, because her comedy is so physical and wild and unembarrassed and brave.
We met in April of 2000, and we weren't really an official couple until June or July. His family has a fishing trip they go on every year in Minnesota, so he had invited me to go and meet his whole family. There was, like, no cell phone service at the time; people were using those giant cordless phones that looked like a brick.
There were so many lessons I learned the hard way: missing out on a raise because I didn't know to ask, having colleagues consistently get credit for my ideas because of how I spoke up in meetings. When I looked for a resource that addressed the challenges I was facing, I couldn't find it. There was nothing.
I was really into old musicals. When I was seven or eight, my mum and dad would be like, 'How does she know who Ginger Rogers is?' Then, one weekend, Josephine Baker popped up in a French film called 'Zouzou,' and I was so stunned because she looked like me.
In high school, I weighed 175 to 180. I looked like Abraham Lincoln. I was 6-foot-3, biggest thing in the class, but tall, not fat.
I was doing the work I was capable of doing with my own native talent, but when I looked at actors like Marlon Brando, Jimmy Dean, Kim Stanley, and Geraldine Page, I knew that they knew something that I didn't know. I wanted to find out what that was.
Ansel Adams rattled around the Southwest with his battered truck and his view camera, which looked like a giant accordion with a lens attached to it.
I remember when I was little, my mom asked me, 'Would you like to play the violin or the piano?' I looked at that giant monster and said to myself - I am not going to lock myself on that bench the whole day. This is small and lightweight. I can play from standing, sitting or walking.
I don't like one-foot jumpers like LeBron James. It looks better jumping off two feet. Every time Michael Jordan jumped off two feet, it looked so much better.
I knew what kind of actor I was going to be, and I looked for inspiration to people like Alec Guinness, Cyril Cusack, Timothy Spall and Jim Broadbent. I looked at them and thought, 'They play human beings as they really are.'
Natto, Japanese ferment bean paste, will never cross my lips again. Spam Musubi, on the other hand, is something I love. I used to have a roommate of Vietnamese descent, and he would eat it all the time. It looked gross, but I finally had it - wrapped in seaweed and rice - it was terrific.
'Impressionism' was the name given to a certain form of observation when Monet, not content with using his eyes to see what things were or what they looked like as everybody had done before him, turned his attention to noting what took place on his own retina (as an oculist would test his own vision).
In a very simple sense I want everything that's in a work to be there for the reason that it's needed. It's not an ornamentation. It's not there because I thought it looked nice but because it has to be there.
I always knew that good stuff would come along when I was older. So when I was 18, I longed to be 30; when I was 30, I longed to be 50. I've always looked forward to my next birthday.
It's an unfortunate reality of being a male dancer that it's not really looked upon... it's not appreciated.
Most people in Iceland are blonde and blue-eyed. I was nicknamed 'China girl' in school 'cos they thought I looked Asian.
Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top; Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace. For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances.
When I was in high school, I looked for the black presence in a British historical tradition - before too much slavery and empire - that would not cost me my self-respect.
I started working in television quite young, actually, and I definitely felt very insecure about what I looked like.
I wasn't a guy who looked to score first. It was to get your teammates involved, to understand time and clock management and having fun with your teammates.
I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them.
I don't have sophisticated tastes. I have average tastes. If you looked in my collection of DVDs, you'd see 'Jaws' and 'Star Wars.' In the book library, you'd see John Grisham and Sidney Sheldon. And if you look in my fridge, it's, like, children's food - chips, milkshakes, yogurt.
Lots of people think I'm telling porky pies when I say how nervous I get about singing. I was good at working out how music was put together, and I was good at being at the back, but if you asked me to sing up front, then I looked like I was going to pass out.
I have played old ladies since I was 17 years old, and very convincingly. I've always looked funny and was too tall to play the leads and so had to play the grandmothers.
I've always hated the way I looked, and I've never complained about my brains.
