I never thought I'd be the type of girl who'd be doing, like, fashion shoots.
I started writing music when I was 15 in my bedroom, and I'd post them on MySpace, and from there it shifted to doing covers on YouTube and building my Twitter.
The funny thing about writing is, although you are writing about an experience which only you have had, you are trying to welcome other people into it, and there are ways I think of doing this, and one of them is through the senses, through the sounds and the smells.
People laugh at me because I don't even know what I'm doing tomorrow.
I'm an actor, so sometimes there are moments where I think about everything that's happening and I want to cry. I'm doing what I love and I will be doing it for a very, very long time - and it's amazing. A lot of people don't get to do that.
It's a human desire to be scared. On some level, that's how we survived - that sense of fear and danger. Our lives are much safer, so we gravitate to those stories that makes us feel those things and learn lessons, even if it's just, 'What are you doing? Don't go in the basement!'
When you're doing a different kind of film, you have to bring a different kind of attitude; you have to bring a different kind of concentration.
I'm actually rubbish at selfies. I always feel a bit ridiculous doing it unless I'm with a bunch of friends, where I'll usually stand at the back with a huge grin on my face!
I've been doing this career for a really long time, but there was not a lot of reason, at the time when I wrote 'Fight Song,' to believe that I should keep going.
I've always liked working really hard and then doing nothing in particular. So, consequently, I didn't overexpose myself; I guess I maintained a kind of mystery. I wasn't ambitious.
I worked full time jobs, basically doing manual labor until I could make enough money supporting myself as a musician.
I was making stickers for guys' bands. I was in the front row photographing bands, booking bands, doing all of the kind of backstage stuff, and I didn't even think for a second I could do it, and then I saw Babes in Toyland, and all that changed.
My feminism is what came squarely up against my faith. There's a lot of ecstatic post-patriarchal Christians who have stuff they do with that. But at that point, you're doing Christianity with a double-superscript. The Bible, and especially the book of Genesis, is pretty unapologetically patriarchal.
One thing you learn doing magic tricks for a living is how close every performance of every magic trick is to disaster. There are no robust magic tricks. They're all hanging from a thread - sometimes literally.
Even if the songs are at times painful - 'cause some of the songs are not all roses and balloons; some of them dig into deep things that I've been going through - there's a joy that I think people feel from my music and, hopefully, from my performance because I am so in love with doing what I do.
I've had moments in my life when I've thought if I wasn't acting, if I wasn't doing what I do and I had a career in the private sector and I didn't have a family, that I do have some tendencies where I could really kind of have a monastic existence and be okay with it.
When we were doing 'The West Wing,' the hardest thing about doing 'The West Wing' was being compared to yourself. You go out there and want every episode to be as good as your best episode. I wrote 88 episodes of 'The West Wing,' and when you do that, one of them is going to be your 88th best, so your 88th best better be pretty good.
My biggest fear is fear itself. I never want to be afraid of doing something I want.
Coming over to Europe you can always put on weight really easily because you are not doing your normal routine at home. It is just a bit more discipline and not eating breads and pastas which are my favourite foods in the entire world.
Financially, I've done very well doing what I do. I've got plenty of money in the bank. I've got gigs with FOX doing analyst work, media work. The UFC has been very kind to me. Ultimately, however, I want to be world champion. I have to achieve that to validate my entire career.
Acting was absolutely my first focus. I graduated high school in L.A., and two weeks afterwards, I moved to New York City, and I got a job in a mail room, and I got an agent, doing what actors do, with head shots and all the rest of it.
I'm not an expert in instruments, beat programming, or electronics. For some people it's all about doing it themselves. But for me, it's all about find the people that can help make my vision come true.
One of the things I've learned from 'Borgen' is that it's very easy to criticise people; 'I hate this politician, I hate what they do.' You are doing this right now with Margaret Thatcher, but sometimes it's hard to be a politician. I'm not defending Margaret Thatcher, but we believe our statesmen are also human beings.
I'm from Mt. Clemens, Michigan. It's right outside Detroit. The suburbs. I was always very heavily involved in theater back then. I was always in drama club or forensics. Anything that you could do that had some performing, I was doing it.
Before breaking into music, I had various jobs: forklift driver, driving a courier. But I was forced into working rather than doing it off my own bat because that was my dad's way: you got a job and paid your way.
I'm doing a film called 'Black Mass' where I play James Bulger. The reason to play him is obvious to me. He's a fascinating character. It's not like anything I've done before on that level. I'm very excited to slide into that skin for a little bit.
I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys.
It used to be that you commit to something, and then basically you spend your year doing that. Now there's a constant conversation of how you have to keep working in order to remind people that you're around.
Television is such an evolving medium. When you're doing a TV show, it's not like you just shoot for six weeks and you're in an editing room with all of your footage. It's like a guitar or a car, you have to fine tune things. You stop doing what's not working, you work on what is working and you add things that do work.
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.
I'd love it if every company could give raises to the average worker for doing good work.
I don't want to walk in the middle. I want people to read what I write and feel strongly about it. If, at some point, whatever I am doing is failing to elicit a response, whether it's very positive or very negative, then I am going to stop doing it.
In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance... you thrive on that.
I was wrapping up my stint on 'Daredevil' co-writing with Andy Diggle during the Shadowland story, when Marvel asked if I was interested in doing something else with DD but a bit different. When they explained the purpose of the 'Season One' books, I was intrigued - I'm a big advocate of books for people new to the medium - and said yes.
I'm constantly listening to music and thinking about it and compiling my own cassettes and CDs in obsessively specific order. I have quite lunatic agendas for what I want to achieve. They won't make sense to anyone other than me, but it is what I've spent most of my life doing.
I get the impression that most Chinese entrepreneurs are so focussed on doing what they need to do to succeed in the Chinese market - which is a big enough challenge even for the established players - that nobody is thinking much about the longer run or the bigger global picture.
