I have twice met Jeffrey Archer, and on both occasions was struck by the firmness of his handshake - and the way he looked me straight in the eye, too.
When I first got into making makeup, I didn't necessarily want to start a company. I just wanted to make a lipstick that looked like lips, only better.
My first job was with 'Dawson's Creek' where everybody looked good and they spoke better than you. It was kind of a wish fulfillment, fantasy-type show.
Why did I elope with my husband after knowing him for only four months? I wish I could show people the picture of the two of us that night and have them feel what I felt. But it's just a picture. It can only capture how things looked, not how they felt.
I was pretty gung-ho about music and pursuing that and figuring that whole thing out, so I was wide-eyed and ready to go when I moved to Nashville. I never looked back.
I look fine. I've had no surgery apart from an operation I had decades ago to remove the fat under my eyes. My mum looked 30 when she was 60, so I guess I owe it all to genes and hair dye.
In my life, I got a haircut junior year of college that was a real wash-'n-go type of situation. It was short. I had six or seven people say I looked just like Hugh Grant. And I was like, 'That's a man. So... that's not nice.'
I didn't like the way I looked in pictures - when I saw myself on a digital camera, I was like, 'Eesh.'
The doors between the old man today and the child are still open, wide open. I can stroll through my grandmother's house and know exactly where the pictures are, the furniture was, how it looked, the voice, the smells. I can move from my bed at night today to my childhood in less than a second.
From fifth grade on, I worked at our public library. The pay, a pittance, was almost superfluous. All through high school, I looked forward to summer as the time when I could work at the library four or five days a week. I was never a camp counselor, a lifeguard, a scooper of ice cream.
I never felt happy with the idea that part of what I do is to be an object to be looked at. I thought of my public persona as an entity separate to myself.
So often, women are there just to be looked at and be objectified for the titillation of the male audience.
I remember the defining moment when I first realised I was famous. I was in Africa staying in the little tent city there by the Masai Mara River. Two guys with spears looked at me and said, 'Frasier?'
I did not like the way I looked in a pair of white pants.
A lot of people have said I'd have probably done better in my career if I hadn't looked so cheap and gaudy. But I dress to be comfortable for me, and you shouldn't be blamed because you want to look pretty.
The whole tax code should be looked at, all the way from farm subsidies to carried interest to - to corporate loopholes, because we really need to raise more revenue.
It's true what they say: 'You don't appreciate what you've got until it's gone.' I miss love. I miss being looked after.
It was great about the sizes of the audiences we were getting in America, but sometimes you feel like telling some of the men that you're not on stage to have your body looked at.
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.
One time, I was literally stopped on the street, literally and physically whipped around by this guy who looked at my face and was like, 'Are you Felix?' I looked very different then. I was like, 'Yah... Oh, yah!' I was stunned and slightly frightened.
When I was young, I had this feeling that there was this handbook that I had never gotten that explained how to be, how to laugh, what to wear, how to stand by yourself in the hallway. Everyone looked so natural - like they all practiced and knew exactly what to do - even the way they pushed their hair out of their face.
I really moved through my career based on curiosity about something. I never looked at a title and said, 'I want that.'
My father looked like this serious guy but was actually a very kind person.
In New York, working at the foundry, I was making these little figures. I desperately would like to make big figures, but I just can't do it; my hands don't do it. We were talking about making bronze plinths, and then we made one, a square one. I wrote on it, then I put a little figure on top, and it just looked really good. It worked.
The more that I looked at DNA, the more I realized it was nature and nurture. It's how genes and your environment work together to produce the person you are.
I used to joke that, since breastfeeding, my boobs looked like an old athletic sock with some loose change at the bottom, so when I felt a lump the size of a marble, I knew something was terribly wrong.
I was on holiday recently and I came home to find that one of the papers here had 'bikini'd' me on the beach. I was wearing a grossly unflattering costume and they had published photographs of me taken from behind. I looked dreadful. I went into our local newsagent and bought up every copy.
I met a guy on the golf course who was a kinesiologist - after I looked up the word, I found out it meant exercise. I started working with him, and that was many years ago.
I have always looked at my competencies before accepting any responsibility.
A whole bunch of agents and editors looked at my stories, and they all said, in effect, 'You're a pretty good writer and you should probably get these published; when you grow up and write a novel, get in touch.'
I've always looked at famous actors and hope that once they get a part that they have success in, they would reprise it every few years in the way a pop singer will reprise their hits. Like Bob Dylan singing 'Blowin' in the Wind' until he's fed up with it, finding different ways of doing it.
My parents were very volatile but very loving. My father would get jealous if my mother looked at somebody. I used to be insanely jealous. It comes out of insecurity. It can come and go, but you get to the point in life where you don't have this raging jealousy and protectiveness about your world.
When I grew up in America, I didn't see anyone who looked like me on TV. I feel overwhelmed with the things that people have said to me. When I meet Indian Americans who've lived here all their lives, it's overwhelming people holding me and crying. Someone said to me, 'Thank you for making us relevant.' It's such a big thing.
I looked at the circus, and I looked at the carnival, at the fun fair. But I looked at sleeping accommodations and decided I was too middle class to put up with that! So then I joined the theater and found I could choose my own bedroom. I loved the atmosphere. I loved that we worked till midnight and didn't start till ten.
I like fashion. My mum was a dressmaker, believe it or not, so the consequence of that was that all my clothes were homemade, and I looked like a terrible mess until I was old enough to buy my own. But I love good tailoring.
I had to figure out how to survive in New York, and most of my time was occupied in getting an apartment and getting money. A lot of older jazz guys looked out for me and found me gigs and places to stay.