My foster parents were very religious. They told me that they had not decided to take me in, rather that it was God that had decided it for them.
It is good to see women doctors and lawyers and executives. I can visualize a woman president. If I were British, I would have supported Margaret Thatcher. But no benefit to anyone can come from women serving in combat.
For a few years, skeins of yarn piled up in baskets around the house. There weren't enough humans in my mother's orbit to wear all the scarves and sweaters and hats she knitted. And then, as suddenly as she started, she lost interest, leaving needles still entwined in half-finished fragments.
Women didn't go to school when they were young because parents preferred to send their brothers. The women couldn't access loans in their own right because the banks sought the approval of a male dependent.
Seven out of my nine films were hits. 80 per cent of the audience loves my films; the remaining 20 per may be right in their opinion, but that doesn't make me wrong. If I try too hard to woo them, I'd be cheating my core audience.
At Christmas, I am always struck by how the spirit of togetherness lies also at the heart of the Christmas story. A young mother and a dutiful father with their baby were joined by poor shepherds and visitors from afar. They came with their gifts to worship the Christ child.
Some writers like to work in other places like coffee shops, but I can't - I'd end up people-watching. And if I were at a bookstore, I'd be reading. Sometimes I have some music on, but usually I like it quiet.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Is the universe 'elegant,' as Brian Greene tells us? Not as far as I can tell, not the usual laws of particle physics, anyway. I think I might find the universal principles of String Theory most elegant - if I only knew what they were.
I was influenced by a lot of stand-up comedians... Eddie Murphy back when he was doing 'Raw.' I watched that so many times as a kid, I can probably still quote the entire thing to this day. Chris Rock. Dave Chappelle. George Carlin. A lot of the guys who were sort of edgy for their time.
In 2007, there weren't any other accelerators, at least that I was aware of. We were almost the prototypical Y Combinator founders: We were highly technical but had never done a startup before. We also didn't know anyone in the Valley - investors, other entrepreneurs, potential hires. YC seemed like a great way to bootstrap that network.
My brothers were gone on tour a lot, and I would miss them so much.
Nobody could tell us or really had a very good idea, if there were a massive release of radiation, what kind of medical treatment people were going to need and this or that, or, indeed, whether there would be medical personnel around.
I think it's important for Donald Trump to express his appreciation for veterans - not John McCain, but veterans who were incarcerated as prisoners of war.
If everyone in the music business were brutally honest about what their intentions were then you could sort things out, but it's all smoke and mirrors.
If you saw a better idea or business anywhere in the world, and you could reapply it legally and ethically and with attribution, you were supposed to do that. And I used that learning in building Cold Stone.
I actually became a producer because I saw the producers getting all the babes. They were stealing them from the guitarists.
Did you ever notice the color of Mary Poppins' petticoats? They were kind of orange and apricot and red. I think she had a secret life going on there.
I think that a lot of terrorists have been middle class and, more surprisingly, many of them have been people who were not directly affected by the things they're angry about.
It's always interesting for me to watch the pilot of an established show because you see how the writers and actors weren't really sure what the show was and what the dynamics were. If you look at the pilot for 'Seinfeld,' for example, it's practically unrecognizable.
I grew up in Beaufort, South Carolina, in a six-room farmhouse with a couple of leaning posts to keep it from fallin'. I came up in a time when men were men.
Even with the beauty stories we put out, we saw there was an opportunity to address issues of representation, identity, self-expression. We created the community that we wanted to have at 'Teen Vogue.' We were willing to lose some to have more.
When it all started, record companies - and there were many of them, and this was a good thing - were run by people who loved records, people like Ahmet Ertegun, who ran Atlantic Records, who were record collectors. They got in it because they loved music... Now, record companies are run by lawyers and accountants.
The Hewitt sisters were these amazing - both sort of philanthropists and dilettantes who went out and single-handedly collected all of these of-the-moment designs in wallpaper and textiles and in graphic design in order to teach people about design.
The threat has changed from simply worrying about foreigners coming here, to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens - raised here, born here, and who for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation in which they were born.
PepsiCo is the largest food-and-beverage company in the United States, and the second-largest in the world after Nestle. If PepsiCo were a country, the size of its economy - sixty billion dollars in revenues in 2010 - would put it sixty-sixth in gross national product, between Ecuador and Croatia.
War, I thought, was the most negative aspect of male heterosexuality. If more men were homosexual, there would be no wars, because homosexual men would never kill other men, whereas heterosexual men love killing other men.
My mother and father didn't love each other, so they were always fighting.
The single biggest lesson I learned was when a hire isn't working out fire them fast. My biggest mistakes, and where I've seen the worst results, were when I gave someone too many chances, or let a situation drift on for too long because I couldn't bring myself to terminate it.
There was a time when meanings were focused and reality could be fixed; when that sort of belief disappeared, things became uncertain and open to interpretation.
I dabbled a little bit in acting in high school, and then I forgot about it completely. And then at about 25 I went to a class. I don't think anybody in my family thought it was an intelligent choice. I don't think anybody thought I'd succeed, which is understandable. I think they were just happy that I was doing something.
I started spending time at stables with my daughter while she was riding. I was reminded of my love for the form and different aspects of the horse. Then I thought about the bit, halter, and bridle in terms of how we harness and ride this animal. There were a lot of interesting elements to explore.
The first years of my life in the U.S. were very difficult.
My roots were in acting. That's all I wanted to be. Even though my father was a radio comedian, it wasn't cool to say, at a young age, 'I want to be a comedian.'
Conceptually, I've always gravitated towards arrangements that weren't just presenting one idea. I like to look at my songs as having a main part, an interlude, and almost like another song at the end.
Some of my favorite records growing up were Christmas albums. The ones I liked best were the albums that you could listen to from start to finish. You could put them on while you're decorating the tree or driving around looking at Christmas lights.
