There's nothing worse than winning but being told by people that you're losing.
I do all the cooking in our family. I'm a utilitarian cook, rather than an adventurous one - I only have about 15 recipes in my repertoire that I rotate - but I love being able to go down to the river and catch a 30 lb. salmon, then grill it on the barbecue.
Exposure makes you famous, not just good work. Famous is being plastered everywhere.
Being a chef isn't the ideal career to intersect with parenting, but I try to be in my kids' lives as much as possible.
Whether your mother is a novelist like mine or a third-generation military wife, the idea of a son or daughter being in mortal danger is terrifying.
People attach too much to the idea of being a model, that you can only be a certain way to have done it. You will always be dealing with it. You're an actor who used to be a model who never trained; there are not many directors queuing up.
I was a sports nut. I stayed after school probably three hours every day - from fall, to winter, to spring. I went from football to basketball to track, and it started all over again. I loved all of it. I just loved being an athlete and all that it entailed. It really accounts for who I am today and even how I think today.
I've always wrestled against being typified in one way or another.
Readers of novels often fall into the bad habit of being overly exacting about the characters' moral flaws. They apply to these fictional beings standards that no one they know in real life could possibly meet.
Once I began doing stand-up, I didn't get a kick out of the applause or being the centre of attention - but I did get a kick out of the jigsaw puzzle aspect of it, searching for the right bit, adding another few pieces each night until the bigger picture appears. That's the appeal: the challenge of it.
When you're the host of the Academy Awards, and you grew up watching Bob Hope and Johnny Carson, and now it's your turn, and you get a chance to run with the baton on the relay for a while, I really embraced it and just really loved being there.
My brother's an aerospace engineer who works for Boeing, and I started thinking, 'Well, my brother works nine hours a day at his job... What if I worked nine hours a day at being an actor?'
The one thing I've always said: Let your family and close friends be the judge of who you are as a person. Don't worry about being judged by others who don't know you, because your family and close friends know what you're all about, good and bad.
One place that I really feel comfortable is being a comedienne. I'm very socially inept. There's so many things that I can not do in life, and this is, like, the one thing that I have mastery over. It's my world. And anybody who's coming to the show, it's like they're coming because they know that this is my world.
I'm very much a hypochondriac, worried about dying, and not having enough time to work with the people I want to work with and being fulfilled as an actor.
I've always had a loud mouth, and for that I've gotten a lot of attention. I did falter in some big competitions in my career, but being counted out and not being seen as a threat is something I'm used to.
My perspective comes in part from being a New York black lady, in part from being an engineer. I know I'm smart and have opinions worth being heard.
Chris Kyle was a human being, a Texan, Navy SEAL, father, husband, brother, friends to many, and a hero to many; this, at a time when we need all the heroes we can get. I knew him to be a good person, regardless of all the hype floating around in the media.
Scientists are being portrayed by much of the power structure in politics and business as having a vested interest - that they're just out to get more grant money by exaggerating the threats.
That's the best thing about being an actor. If you're in a baseball movie, you walk away knowing way more about baseball, or if you're in a sci-fi film, you learn way more about Comic-Con, and so I loved all that.
In acting, you have a writer, a director, a character - you're working through being another person - and the irony I always tell people is when I acted early on as a teenager, it actually kept me out of trouble.
I haven't been an actor who's been able to pick and choose roles, and being a family man, it's been about putting food on the table.
Never be afraid to ask when you don't understand. It sounds like a little thing, but awful things have happened, international incidents have flared, and markets have collapsed just because people couldn't make sense of what was being said. They didn't ask 'why?' because they thought it would make them look stupid.
I've been misunderstood when it comes to women. I've got a big heart and a little brain. But I love women being women; there's something about their skin. I do love strong, independent women, but they are definitely complicated.
Most people get scared away from having an opinion. It's not so much my opinions everybody relates to, it's that I don't care about being punished for it.
I am often criticised for being rather accessible.
During my first open ocean dive, I went down to 800 feet and turned out the lights. I knew I would see bioluminescence, but I was totally unprepared for how much. It was incredible! There were explosions of light everywhere, like being in the middle of a silent fireworks display.
Fundamental physics is like an art more or less. It's completely non-practical, and you can't use it for anything. But it's about the universe and how the world came into being. It's very remote from your daily life and mine, and yet it defines us as human beings.
'The Whole Nine Yards' I liked right away. It was kind of a dark comedy at first. And just the idea of being in a movie with Bruce Willis was pretty exciting.
Models are some of the most insecure people I've ever met. They're constantly being told they're not good enough. You've really got to practice loving yourself.
This might be controversial, but sometimes I think that being happy is a decision. I don't mean that in a way to diminish clinical depression. But on a more day-to-day level.
The advantage of knowing about risks is that we can change our behavior to avoid them. Of course, it is easily observed that to avoid all risks would be impossible; it might entail no flying, no driving, no walking, eating and drinking only healthy foods, and never being touched by sunshine. Even a bath could be dangerous.
Technically, my first acting job was in one of my videos for a song called 'Retrospect For Life,' which Lauryn Hill directed and featured an actress by the name of N'bushe Wright, who played my girlfriend who was about to be pregnant. I remember being so nervous about it, but now I feel like I can conquer the world with it.
What I really like about 'Grit' - especially being the guy who goes on TV every week and says 'Never Give Up' and who truly tries to live his life to that credo - we recruited 16 people who said, 'I will never give up.' And the only way they can leave the contest is by doing the one thing they said they never would.
Aeroplane journeys give me quiet time to read and sleep; it's like being unplugged from the earth.
I often joke that I straddle psychosis and neurosis, and that being an artist keeps me in the middle, so I can work between the two.
