The problem is that once I start on a song and get a rough idea of where I might go with an arrangement, I try dozens, sometimes hundreds, of different things on a song. The bass, the backing guitars, the lead guitars, the keyboards. It's a long proc...
I never tire of the heroes that I knew growing up. The fun is not that much different from doing a television show: You're stuck with a certain set of rules, and then, rather than trying to break them, it's just trying to peel away and see what's und...
I am never happy with what I do, so I try not to watch stuff that is filmed with me in it because I am always like, 'Oh, I could have done that a little bit better,' or, 'I could have done that differently - that riff could have been a little better....
What I love is how seamless everything is. You walk throw a forest and come out in a village; and there’s no difference, no division. You aren’t in nature one minute and in civilization the next. The houses are made out of mud and stone and wood,...
I usually start writing a novel that I then abandon. When I say abandon, I don't think any writer ever abandons anything that they regard as even a half-good sentence. So you recycle. I mean, I can hang on to a sentence for several years and then put...
The hard part for me was being an Olympic gold medalist and having that persona; you don't see too many Olympic gold medalists go into acting. It's actually even more difficult. You're not taken very seriously, and you're looked at in a different lig...
What's considered ideal in Hollywood is completely different than anywhere else in the world. I don't think you can aspire to it, nor can I. Everybody is retouched, stretched, lengthened, slimmed and trimmed. I could look at a picture of myself from ...
When I first started working, I was very aware of the fact that I'd been to university and studied Russian and French and not acting. So when I started working, I'd started working quite young, I felt like it was important to treat myself kind of lik...
It's one thing to say you think someone "hung the moon" but that generally means you are blind and deluded, and then the relationship fails because they say you changed, when really, they never saw you at all...The real test is if someone sees all yo...
It's fun to get away from myself for a while when I take on these roles that have very different personalities from my own. I get to say things I normally wouldn't say or act in ways I normally wouldn't act. After all, such roles are more challenging...
My memories of Kabul are vastly different than the way it is when I go there now. My memories are of the final years before everything changed. When I grew up in Kabul, it couldn't be mistaken for Beirut or Tehran, as it was still in a country that's...
Launching a start-up, you need to get a lot done quickly. Every day is different. Everyone pitches in with everything. It's easy for the founding team to say, 'We're flexible. We all help out with everything!' But when it comes to making decisions - ...
This morning I awoke drowning in sadness. Sleepily, I probed my heart looking for a cause. Then, rising from the dream, I took possession of my feelings and gave them back to God - the only Source of my life. And that feeling of sadness - redeemed - ...
Frankly that's what makes such a big difference between President Obama on one hand and Mitt Romney on the other. Gov. Romney has not walked in those shoes of the ordinary Americans and frankly I don't think he has the capacity to quite understand th...
I was bullied and picked on because I was so different to everyone else, and I definitely didn't believe or even know I was fabulous back then. But those hard times made me everything I am today. It's all water under the bridge now, but being bullied...
Different plants thrive together in a well nurtured garden. Just as they thrive, they pass on a message to mankind - God created us all to thrive with one another and planted love in our hearts for this reason. Let's learn to embrace each other, know...
I was always the tallest girl in my class, and it made me have really bad posture because I wanted to seem shorter than I really was. It really reflected how I felt about myself. I spent most of my youth in school feeling really insecure about the wa...
Julia supposed that there was also a difference in perspective: 'The practical level was another level down [in 1960s social movements] and not so interesting. I don't know much about organizing, but I feel as though, if the reality of the situation ...
There have been times when people who weren't my friends all of a sudden became my friend. I won't allow them to use me, but I have been pretty lucky to have friends who have supported me and who I have known since I was 12. They are still the same a...
My wife is the host of 'Big Brother.' Her name is Julie Chen, and she'll say, 'Da da da, but first we do this.' So they mashed together her saying 'but first' a couple dozen times. Literally. In different outfits. And when you cut it together like th...
A woman with a sense of humor is never vain. (...) A woman who has a sense of humor possesses no refuge from the merciless truth about herself. She cannot think herself misunderstood. She cannot revel in self-pity. She cannot comfortably damn any one...
