My personal missteps - how many Americans have died as a result of that? None. Other than my family, how many victims were there? None. And yet, in refusing to engage in a responsible debate about Iraq, how many Americans died? Thousands. And America...
When I was 5 and my sister was 3, we went on a family trip, and she ate cheese off the floor at an airport. My mother, a germaphobe, got very upset. My sister, of course, got a stomach virus, and ever since then, I have an aversion to cheese.
The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn't have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I dep...
The first lesson my kids got about the ocean was to respect it. You can never turn your back on the ocean when you're dealing with tides and currents - factors beyond your control. You have to be the CEO of your family on the water. CEO stands for 'c...
When you - when someone dies in your family and you think you're over it, and then you wake up in the morning and it hits you, 'I won't ever see my brother again. I won't ever see my mom again.' And it just kind of hits you like that.
I never really got nightmares from movies. In fact, I recall my father saying when I was three years old that I would be scared, but I never was. I was much more terrified by my own family and real life, you know?
Sometimes, in order to follow our moral compass and/or our hearts, we have to make unpopular decisions or stand up for what we believe in. It can be difficult and even frightening to go against the grain, whether it's a personal disagreement with a f...
I miss family and friends, and I'd like to get back to work more in Scotland, and do more things like theatre and 'Red Road.' But over here you have the beach and the mountains and the climate. A lot of people diss L.A. as being all tinsel town, fake...
I met my husband, Jacob, in medical school. We married and went to live in Hawaii where his family lived. It was very beautiful, but I wasn't used to being on an island and needed wide open spaces. Eventually we moved to Maine, New England.
I think my family needs me more than anybody else, and tennis doesn't need me anymore. I respect my wife a lot for taking all that in. She said, 'I didn't marry a tennis player; you'd retired.' Now it's time to do something else.
There's so many things I want to do. I want to work with great filmmakers, great actors, great scripts. And there's no reason for me to do anything short of that, because I'm 24, I don't have a family, I don't need to make tons of money, and I'm not ...
That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said - one of the famous lady novelists - 'unhappy ...
Ever since I've been blessed with success, I've struggled a little with anonymity and even family. I've had people calling asking for money, and I have to ask them first, 'Are you working? Have you been trying to help yourself?' Then I feel like I ca...
We were a very politically active family. My father was one of the first lawyers in South Africa to have a black partner, so I grew up very aware of the struggle going on. Coming from that background, it really gave me chills to have my music be a pa...
When I was a teenager, my biggest lessons came from Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, George Strait, Rascal Flatts and Brad Paisley. I learned so much from opening up for those artists, and it also taught me how to treat your opening acts and make them feel...
Quite frankly, Barack Obama knows what it's like to pay a mortgage and student loans. He knows what it's like to watch a beloved family member in a medical crisis and worry that treatment is out of reach. Barack Obama knows our struggles. And, my fri...
ABC's intelligently hilarious sitcom 'Modern Family' depicts a gay-male marriage in which both partners are refreshingly dimensional, believable human beings. The writers dare to make them flawed and thus fully delineated, but they're not flawed in t...
My mother was the first woman in the county in Indiana where we were born, in Jay County, to have a college degree. She was educated as a pianist and she wanted to concertize, but when the war came she was married, had a family, so she started teachi...
Touring is tough. You're almost in a haze because you don't really know where you are half the time: You're in a hotel room one moment, and the next thing you know, you're onstage performing for 60,000 people, then you're back on an airplane. It's ve...
One thing I didn't understand in life was that I had $100,000,000 in the bank and I couldn't buy happiness. I had everything: mansions, yachts, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, but I was depressed. I didn't know where I fitted in. But then I found family and ...
Being a teen can be tough. Just try to surround yourself with really good friends that really have your back, and also be a really good friend to those who really care about you. If you're not sure about certain things, talk to your friends that you ...
