I love playing 'Madame Vastra.' Although I do suffer, spending three-and-a-half hours in make-up every morning to have her lizard skin put on. I was so excited the first day when we did the make-up test, but after six hours, I was like, 'Can we finish now?'
Acting in film, you know, I hear all the time, people say 'You did so much better than I thought you would.' So there's an added element of surprise in film, different than in music.
I trained as hard as I could, I ran as much as I could, I sparred hard, I did everything right. I did everything I could possibly do at the age when I could fight. You have to be realistic; you can't say, 'Oh, I am smarter now, older and I can punch harder.' You think you can, but you can't.
Just going along with this, what I did, or what I do is I imagine not being myself seeing it, but imagine somebody else who's seeing it for the first time.
The musicians I respected were much older than me. I expected them to cut my head, and they did.
I have no problems with private schools. I graduated from one and so did my mother. Private schools are useful and we often use public funds to pay for their infrastructures and other common needs.
After the war, there was no industry. We lost the war. We had our whole city destroyed. No money. No studio. No film. No camera. No equipment. We would shoot in the street. We had no actors. Nothing. But we wanted to do movies. And we did the best movies in the world.
I sketched out a rough story for them and the director said, well it's a good story but we have the go-ahead from Universal to make this script and did I want to do it. I said no, and they left.
Layers are not difficult for me. You have the luxury of takes, so if you feel like, say, you did not take in the fact that your aunt is across the way in one take, you do it again and try to add that piece.
It dawned on me that acting was what I wanted to do with my life. Nothing had ever touched my heart like acting did.
I did 'Lone Star Love' in 2007 with Randy Quaid, and that was supposed to come to Broadway at the Belasco and a marquee went up and everything... and it all fell apart, and that marquee came right down, and we got severance pay. And, it was very sad.
I grew up in the Midwest, quite far from any ocean or any beach, a million miles. I think for kids who grew up where I did, the idea of California, surfing and beach life was so exotic and glamorous.
Many people who did not die right away came down with nausea, headache, diarrhea, malaise, and fever, which lasted several days. Doctors could not be certain whether some of these symptoms were the result of radiation or nervous shock.
But, hey I did everything the right way and earned my spot in this game, nothing was given to me.
I had more friends on my hockey team than I did on my soccer team. I might have been better at soccer, to be honest. But I think it was more the friendship, and my family was more of a hockey family than a soccer family, so when I had to make a decision, I tried hockey, and it turned out to be a good decision.
When I became CEO, I just didn't think about my age too much. I'm sure many people did think that my age mattered, but I didn't. That was probably because of my age.
One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading. I have been a reader ever since.
For most of my writing life, I've refused to allow myself to believe that writing was a significant form of action. I always felt very uneasy about the fact that all I did was write in a situation as desperate as apartheid South Africa. Whether I was correct or not is a different issue.
I don't want to expose the intricacies of my work so people can understand how I did it.
If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?
I am not a newcomer, you know, so I want to be judged for what I did when I was prime minister last time in Italy and president of the European Commission for more than five years.
The way I was parented did affect my parenting - probably in the reverse. My dad was pretty strict, and the next generation probably wants to be less strict.
If wanted to play a sport, I played a sport. If I wanted to do things that many girls born in 1950 didn't do, I did it.
I did a school play when I was 10 where I played a cold germ infecting a whole classroom of kids. The play was called 'Piffle It's Only a Sniffle.' I'd never had so much fun. It was a thrill.
I am atheist in a very religious mould. I'm always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? When I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.
Once a profound truth has been seen, it cannot be 'unseen'. There's no 'going back' to the person you were. Even if such a possibility did exist... why would you want to?
It confirms for me that we did something on Days that meant something. We had our ups and downs, but Missy and I and some of the other actors, created something that was really memorable.
I did not start IC and Inteam to have control over my music. I had control before and after.
Smokey and The Bandit was just a lark. All we did was run up and down those Georgia roads wrecking cars and having the time of our life.
My constituents say, 'Congressman, have you balanced the budget?' And I'm going to say, 'Well, we're working on it.' And they are going to say, 'Well, Congressman, did you get rid of Fannie and Freddie?' And I'm going to say, 'Well, we're working on it.'
I took some lessons as a kid but trained myself by ear. I did it the way jazz musicians used to learn years ago, which is to play records and slow them down to figure out the notes. At first I tried to imitate Red Garland, who was my favorite jazz pianist.
But he did say that the character would be on the sidelines in movies One and Two, and move into the middle with number Three, but I didn't realize he would move in with quite such a bang.
Thousands of years and many civilizations have defined a marriage as the union between one man and one woman. With few exceptions, those civilizations that did not follow that perished.
Then somebody suggested I should write about the war, and I said I didn't know anything about the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn't see how I could write it.
The church needs a pope who can call us to conversion and lead us to take seriously what Jesus did.
But as I said to Dr. Rice following her testimony, and I think she appreciated it, we had our job to do and we did it best we could, trying to get answers to the important questions that the 9/11 Commission must answer.
