It's the contemporary woman that movies don't know what to do with, other than bathe her in a bridal glow in romantic comedies where both the romance and the comedy are artificial sweeteners.
I watch comic book movies. Give me 'The Avengers,' give me 'Thor', those are my area. But I don't watch comedies.
I think that all stories - if you make movies about zombies and aliens - it has always to do with your personal story. If not directly, it is about your fears, your obsessions, things like that.
Movies such as 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington' in 1939 to 'Dave' in 1993 portray Washington leaders as the ultimate Everymen - decent people just like you and me, only thrust onto greatness.
And I withdrew into myself when I understood that they wanted to extract every thought in my head, one by one, like decayed teeth.
An investigation by msnbc.com shows that the CDC routinely takes as long as a month - and sometimes as long as nine months - to visit the scene of firefighter deaths.
American politics used to be an amateur sport. But somewhere along the way, we handed over to professionals all the things people used to do for free.
Politics is so much about serendipity that we've got to have a bigger pool of women, so that when people drop out of the process, you've got others to turn to.
Attack politics costs us dearly in terms of insight into the candidates. In a presidential campaign, the focus is so tight that the politicians are afraid to say anything that hasn't been scripted.
Republican politics have been off-kilter for several years now because a large segment of the conservative base does not look back fondly on the Bush presidency.
The fallback position in politics is if you don't know what you want to be about, and if you don't know what your vision is, go at somebody else.
I know enough about European politics to know you've got a lot of crazy people who make their way onto the ballot.
If you really want to diminish a candidate, depict him as the foil of his handler. This is as old in American politics as politics itself. It's easy to point at me. I'm convenient.
The minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.
And new people come in, and it doesn't go along with their politics, and they fire me, end the column, silence a voice in Los Angeles. They can't silence it nationally, but they are able to do it there.
Women have demanded and gotten better jobs and more power. But the one thing we deserve is a better relationship with ourselves.
One week, you can have a real heavy romance 'Chuck' episode, and the next week it can be some kind of murdery mystery. It's not like doing a procedural.
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.
If every woman who's had an abortion took tomorrow off in protest, America would grind to a halt. And that would be symbolic: because women grind to a halt if they are not in control of their fertility.
People get really scared when women reclaim words, talk about themselves honestly and also make jokes because it's a really unstoppable combination.
We are very luck to be women, so even if we're wearing trousers, I always wear them with some lace underwear or a very feminine bra - I like that.
