Humility was considered a great virtue in my family household. No show of complacency or self-satisfaction was ever tolerated. Patting yourself on the back was definitely not encouraged, and pleasure or pride would be punishable by death.
Everything I do has the tinge of the finite, of my own demise. At some point you either accept death or you just keep pushing it back as you get older and older. I've accepted it.
I've lived out many of the dreams I had as a little girl, back when I was riding my pony, mucking stalls, feeding cows, aspiring to finally become a professional jockey and racing in stakes races on a worldwide stage.
I can design a collection in a day and I always do, cause I've always got a load of Italians on my back, moaning that it's late.
I worked in fashion, but I worked more in the sales side of fashion than in design. I was an assistant buyer for a department store back in the '70s and the early years of Saint Laurent. And I used to have a lot of private clients that I bought for.
Back in high school, I went on dates, but I was too focused on my career. My parents were like, 'It's nice to have a boyfriend, but it's even nicer to own your house when you're 21.'
Back in the 1960s , I got a superb education for very little money. The bill for my first year at Harpur College in New York was a few hundred dollars.
I pretty much left full-time, formal education when I was 11, so that was when I was taken out of the school system... The longest stretch I would go back for was a term and a half when I was about 14.
I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.
My mother was born on a tiny farm in County Mayo. She was meant to stay at home and look after the farm while her brother and sister got an education. However, she came to England on a visit and never went back.
I wanted to further my education, so I went on to get a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and came back and served about ten years in the Canadian Navy as what we call a combat systems engineer.
Hollywood is fickle; your career can end pretty fast. If the acting jobs dry up, you have to have something to fall back on. In fact, that would be my advice to kids interested in acting - make sure you get an education too.
I was one of the first 18-year-olds in the United States elected to public office right after 18-year-olds got the right to vote back in the early '70s. I ran for the Board of Education.
Education should not be about building more schools and maintaining a system that dates back to the Industrial Revolution. We can achieve so much more, at unmatched scale with software and interactive learning.
We must promote upward mobility, starting with solutions that speak to our broken education system, broken immigration policy, and broken safety-net programs that foster dependency instead of helping people get back on their feet.
I reflect back 35 years ago, and look how far we have come in America with our environmental policy to improve the conditions of our air and water, and we have had some real successes.
I think the key to passion, to zeal, is gratitude. Or to put it another way, the fuel to motivate is gratitude, and gratitude comes by just backing up a little and realizing how much you've sinned against God.
I look back to when I got divorced in the late 1970s. When that happened, I was so broken up. After that, I decided to seek God for my life and my next marriage.
All my success seems to come straight away, and it's not until later that I get to appreciate it. Like with 'Popstars,' I won the competition, and now I look back and go, 'God, I was lucky to have number-one singles and albums.'
My father hates organized religion, probably because he hates the God who killed his little girl back in 1968. I find religions variously bemusing.
I don't want to be a great executive without being a great mum and a great wife. I don't want to look back and say I wish I had done things differently. 'Balance' is a really big word for me.
