The comics were not only stories to enjoy; for me they were drawings that possessed me.
I play Nitin Sawhney's 'Letting Go' repeatedly, nonstop. I find it transformative. I'm so glad iPods were invented so I didn't have to drive everyone around me mad with the repetition.
My family weren't actors, and we didn't know any actors. It wasn't even something I was aware you could do as a job. I thought you had to be a Redgrave or a Barrymore before you were allowed to go to drama school.
I had worked on the markets with my father before going to university, so I possessed an apparent street-smartness, had access to a colourful costermonger vocabulary, and tried passing myself off as a bit of spiv. But my contemporaries saw through me. At heart, they knew I was as bookish and oversensitive as they were.
Mostly I want to talk positive; I wanna talk about a bunch of great kids that I coached and made me look good and the university that I've seen grow from a cow college, which it was, only 12,000 people, and when I came here, we weren't at Pennsylvania State University, we were at Penn State College.
When I first heard Kraftwerk, I thought they were an American band singing in German.
My mum lives in Boston; she's famous for teaching wushu and t'ai chi. So from when I was young, my mum and aunt were like: 'You're training; you're not playing baseball or football.' Training every day was normal. Later, when I was almost a teenager, Bruce Lee became my idol.
I came to New York when I was eighteen years old, and the first audition that I ever went to was this huge cattle call at the Equity building where I had gone two days earlier to sign up - I didn't have an agent or anything. It was for 'Chicago.' There were probably three hundred people there.
I grew up with the idea of the cyborg and the robot, but at the same time I felt this intense disconnection between the things I was engaged with and inspired by in terms of fun and play. It seemed like paintings and drawings were so static.
Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.
It was great about the sizes of the audiences we were getting in America, but sometimes you feel like telling some of the men that you're not on stage to have your body looked at.
I think on 'ER,' my other long-running show, I had some ideas about what's going on. 'Stargate Universe,' they were kind of secretive too a little bit about what they wanted to do, but I kind of liked working this way. I like the surprises, and I like knowing just enough to work on the character.
I decided at 15 that I didn't want to be one of those artists that gets up and sings love songs they don't mean. I decided that I was going to be me to the fullest extent, that my songs were going to reflect relationships I've had, things I've been through, and even the stuff I'm embarrassed about.
Growing up, I'd watch 'Rambo' or 'Commando,' and so many action heroes were these huge guys with six-pack abs. It almost became a novelty.
After my father died, we were pretty much wiped out financially as a family, so I decided to give finance a try.
Pageants were a platform for me, and they helped me get to where I am today. You suddenly stop being just another girl, and people want to listen to what you have to say.
Love is the reason you were born.
You'd go to a Pakistani party and the men and women would go in at the front door and the women would go to the right and the men would go to the left, and that was the last that we'd see of them until we were coming home.
The missile that downed the Malaysian plane, they say, is a Russian-made missile. But the weapons that are used in the barbarism in the barbaric act against the Palestinians were made by the West, and nobody is blaming them. Nobody talks about it; not even the U.N. Security Council can pass a resolution against Israel!
When I started off in journalism, you knew there was an audience out there and that you wanted people to read what you produced. But it also felt like you had a limited ability to shape the audience, or to acquire an audience, for what you were doing. So you didn't really think too much about that.
I think people can just make things now. It's kind of what happened with the music industry. Before, a band couldn't afford to go into a nice studio, or if they were going to go into a nice studio, they had to record twenty-five songs in two days. That's not a healthy workflow for anyone.
There were numerous times where, at the end of a week of working on a song, there was a part of it that we still weren't feeling, so we'd scrap the whole thing and start from scratch the next week.
One thing that was amazing about World War II was that everybody signed up for the duration plus six months. Fliers got to leave combat after 25 missions, or 35 missions, but other than that, you were in it. You were part of the great effort, until, oh boy, six months after it was over.
I keep waiting for the day in which everyone who loves 'Downton Abbey' will realize they were actually watching a historical romance novel.
I've really never written about my relationships, or things like that. I wouldn't want to divulge things that were too private.
Virtually all of Africa's civil wars were started by politically marginalized or excluded groups.
To prevent the theft of 'Ben-Hur's sets, guards were prowling the back lot long after production had been shut down.
If I were to leave and raise a venture fund, I would have to find 10 or 100 LPs. They would all give me a bunch of money, and I would take a percentage of that to pay myself. They would expect me to invest that over the next three years, and they want that money back in seven or eight years.
My ambition has always been to work with English and American actors and directors. Those were the movies that I was watching when I was growing up.
At the time of the Civil War, there were six democracies in the face of the planet. Today, there's 120 and they've been inspired by the American exceptionalism.
My whole career began because I was always putting my music on the Internet. By the time I had my first tour, I had an audience everywhere I went, because people were listening online.
In high school I had a boyfriend who was super into rap, so I was into Too $hort and Wu-Tang for a little while. And my best friend's older brother would sometimes drive us home in this pimped-out truck, and he'd play all his dirty rap music. We thought we were really cool.
I'd been writing stories since I was a child. I wrote little books for my mom and bound them myself with needle and thread. Mostly, they were about my pets.
When I got the role in 'Homeland,' it really opened something up. Other people respected me more as an actor, doors were opened, and I understood for the first time that it wasn't personal. All that rejection wasn't personal.
I appreciate the few people who say nice things about me and say, 'Gee, you were right about this,' or, 'You were right about that.' But frankly, I spend my time looking ahead. I've got 23 grandkids, and I'm concerned about what their world is going to be like.
My heroes were people like Jim Jarmusch. Scorsese was my god. Spike Lee was exciting, doing exactly what we thought we were going to do: personal movies based in, and about, New York. My heroes were all participating in an economic model that was collapsing as I was finishing film school.
