I did karate for about three years. When I was going into Miss Texas, my mom said, 'Let's not do karate this year. Let's not have any knocked-out teeth on the stage.'
I remember failing my Princeton interview. My mom wanted me to apply because ever since I was a kid she had this dream that I would apply to Princeton, but it was just not happening.
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.
That's actually how my parents met. They were pen pals. My mom was in the Philippines and my father was in the States, and they wrote to each other. He went out to meet her, and they wed not too long after.
I have a very broad demographic, from the 8-year-old who knows every word to 'Ice Ice Baby' and the college kid who grew up on 'Ninja Rap' to the soccer mom and grandparent.
When I first got into the entertainment industry, I would always watch Rihanna and all those people, so I was like, 'Ooh, I have to be this.' So my mom was like, 'Just be yourself.'
I wanted to be a child actor so bad that every day I'd beg my parents if I could audition, but my mom said, 'Not until you can drive yourself to auditions.'
I wanted to escape so badly. But of course I knew I couldn't just give up and leave school. It was only when I heard my mom's voice that I came out of my hiding place.
A Code of Honor: Never approach a friend's girlfriend or wife with mischief as your goal. There are just too many women in the world to justify that sort of dishonorable behavior. Unless she's really attractive.
My narrators tend to be women with low self-esteem, so I can send them to charm school.
I keep returning to the central question facing over-50 women as we move into our Second Adulthood. What are our goals for this stage in our lives?
A man notices a woman's figure when she walks in a room. Women have eight million words for blue; a man says dark blue or light blue.
I think female-female relationships interest me so much more because they're so encoded. There is kind of a psychic element that happens within groups of women.
Big women do themselves a disservice when they attempt to become the Righteous Fat (the Righteous Thin are bad enough, all that running around and sweating, somehow believing it means anything).
'Stress' was the catch-all every pamper-pedlar I spoke to used to explain why healthy women feel the need to be regularly patted, petted and preened into a state of babyish beatification.
I know a lot of women who embody what it means to be a feminist but do not want to use that word. The misperceptions about what it's all about have gotten into their heads.
All my friends are female, I've edited for a magazine for young girls for 15 years, I relate to women, and I'm very, very close to my younger sister.
Right now women are using surrogates because they can't be pregnant. What worries me is the possibility that soon they'll use surrogates because they don't want to be pregnant.
To hike out alone in the desert; to sleep on the valley floor on a night with no moon, in the pitch black, just listening to the boom of silence: you can't imagine what that's like.
As for sticking strictly to presently known science, I will simply point out that we have already experienced at least two major revolutions in science in this century alone.
A movie like House of the Dead with around $7 million budget or Alone in the Dark with around $16 million budget are much easier to make profit than the typical $50 million major motion picture.
