My mom and dad met at Anaheim High School. After they got married, all they wanted to do was have four children, and they did.
When my parents were like, 'We're going to the Northwest,' I thought, 'You've gotta be kidding me.' I was so depressed. The cold weather really did not agree with me. When I moved back down to L.A. at 16, I felt like it was home - it was where I belonged.
I did an episode of 'Frasier' with my friend Kelsey Grammer once.
I never really learned the value of money. My father didn't spoil me, but I think my grandparents did.
If I was applying for a legal position, I would highlight my experience working for the San Francisco-L.A. DA's office, and I would mention some of the high-profile cases I did, but if I was looking for another television job, I would gloss over that, and I'd mention the highlight reel of what I did in television.
I was a freelancer all through my twenties. I did about one story a month and I wanted to write fiction, so the stories that I would do were precursors to 'Sex and the City.'
For years I did most of my reading on the F train between Brooklyn and Manhattan. I had long commutes, and I read tons of books on that train; I loved it.
You know, one of the things my husband says when people say 'Well, what did you bring to Washington,' he said, 'Well, I brought arithmetic.'
I met Kanye. I'm starstruck, man, but I stayed away from that guy. I didn't want him to go on a rant, go off on me. He did it at his wedding.
We first started to rent old VFW halls in Philly or whatever; we rented kegs and did parties and played our own music. We had to find a way to do it because nobody else was helping us, and I think now it's important to keep those dialogues happening, those parties happening.
Growing up in a Jewish matriarchal world inside the patriarchal paradise of Salt Lake City, Utah, gave me increased perspective on gender issues, as it also did my gay brother and my lesbian sister. Our younger sister is the perfect Jewish-American wife and mother, and is fiercely proud of that fact.
I saw an interview that I did with someone, and I was horrified by it. And I said to my wife, 'This is unbearable how I talk.'
In the '70s, the newspaper guild managed to get people paid what they were worth, but the reporters suddenly became middle class. It's much more respectable, more uptight, and everyone speaks in guarded tones. And the writing isn't as good. We always had guys who were failed poets and failed novelists who did it to eat.
I did commercials and voice-overs as a kid, and it just lead to musical theatre opportunities.
I look back at 'Saturday Night Live' and I think, some people didn't like me doing 'Weekend Update.' Who cares? A lot of people did. When you're reaching that many people, you're not going to have everybody like you.
If I had posted my first video a week later, I don't know if it would have spread like it did. That's why, with everything I do, I try to enjoy the making of it instead of worrying about the release and reception.
On the Sandy bill, I did the best I could on waste, fraud and abuse, and then when the final bill comes, you don't say, 'Hell, no' because you didn't get everything you want in there.
I would try to write my own story about some East Coast suburbanite having an affair or something like that. So I did that for maybe two years or so, and it just wasn't working for me at all.
I myself don't have Netflix. And recently, I was staying at a friend's place who did, and I was feeling rather poorly one morning, and I sat down and watched the entire series of 'The Killing,' the American version of 'The Killing' in one day. I just got hooked. I thought, 'Wow, I've never done this before.'
People say, 'You have inspired me, you've given me courage...' They've gone so far as to say, 'You've changed my life!' And I would come back and say to my husband, 'I can't understand it - what kind of poor little life did she have if I had to come and change it?'
Did Google need to make robot cars in order to make Streetview work? Absolutely not. It's the equivalent of saying you need a walking robot in order to push an upright vacuum cleaner. It's gratuitous robotics!
I respect and value the ideals of rugged individualism and self-reliance. But rugged individualism didn't defeat the British, it didn't get us to the moon, build our nation's highways, or map the human genome. We did that together. This is the high call of patriotism.
I did a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, and his skill level was eons ahead of mine. It was really more like an abattoir - he just slaughtered my character over and over again.
I did not study science at school until I was 13, when I was totally turned on by a seemingly dreary old teacher who suddenly, unannounced, manufactured a huge explosion in the middle of a totally boring monologue. From then on, all of his class wanted to make explosions.
I don't know if it's a failure of imagination on my part, but I'm not going to be writing about Paris in the 1800s. I feel like it would come off as just ludicrously uninformed, even if I did a lot of research.
I did most of my volunteer work when I was in college because I knew of more ways to get involved. In high school, we'd do things like, there was a homeless shelter near our hometown and our church group decorated one of the rooms. In college, I was in a sorority, and we did a lot of things, like pick up trash on the highway.
Directing was easy for me because I was a writer director and did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay.
I was not a great bartender, but I did OK. I wasn't great at being efficient behind the bar, but I was pretty great at talking to people. I was a pretty good waiter. It was painstaking to get me to care about the clientele of some of these places I was working at.
There are certain things that we take for granted that simply would not have existed without the great migration. Motown, for example, would not have existed - it simply would not, because Berry Gordy, the founder of it, his parents had migrated from Georgia to Detroit where he founded Motown, and where did he get his talent?
I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.
I guarantee that if you threw 100 people into a room, the first three questions they would ask each other are: 'Where did you grow up?,' 'Where did you go to school?' and 'What do you do for a living?' Most people on Bumble are looking for a life partner, and those things have a huge impact on compatibility.
I did make a solo album in my house when I was there. And because I was just afraid of flying, I wouldn't promote it, and I wouldn't tour. Actually, it wasn't a very good album anyway - it got buried underneath the pits of Hell, I suppose.
It was right after I did Piaf, 'La Vie en Rose'. I started to take singing lessons and finding where I could go.
I've always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn't have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.
I did not want to be the best black man of the year; I wanted to be the best man of the year.
The English playwrights of the '50s and '60s didn't really keep writing or getting produced, while the Irish did. There's encouragement for the younger ones also in the fact that Ireland is exceptional in its ability to make theater part of the national dialogue, and it reaches to all four corners of the country.
