I made, over the years in Cambridge, several very good American friends, and America appeared to me, a land of promise in every sense of that word, a land of freedom from the inhibitions and restrictions that I felt in England.
I went to a great church here in L.A., gave my heart to the Lord and felt freedom from things I've carried throughout my life that I just thought, 'I don't have to carry them any more.'
You can't please everyone, but I've always felt you cannot ultimately lose if you give everything you try 110%. You'll always learn something useful, even from a failure, that can be applied to the next challenge or project.
I felt a failure because I couldn't sustain myself from what I earned from my writing. My day jobs were what mattered, and it was hard to even get those because universities wouldn't hire me as a real writer.
The book begins and ends with the visits to give the impression of a tunnel into their ancestors and family history. I believe in going backwards into the past - I felt I was digging a tunnel back to the past.
I'm a hard worker and love my work. I have felt pulled toward work. And it's a pull I have ferociously had to counter to make room for my family.
Being a Barrymore didn't help me, other than giving me a great sense of pride and a strange spiritual sense that I felt OK about having the passion to act. It made sense because my whole family had done it and it helped rationalise it for me.
Every time I was playing basketball, I felt sick to my stomach. I didn't realize that feeling was having to leave my family - having to leave my sister, who can't even communicate with me when I'm gone.
I was born and grew up in Fitzgerald, way down in south Georgia. It was a mill town and my family ran the cotton mill. My grandfather was mayor many times and my family felt deeply rooted to that spot.
I worked my butt off in high school and received a lot of scholarships for college and to throw all that away for acting was tough for my family, but it was just something I felt my heart pulling me towards and don't regret a single minute of it. I l...
I cannot remember a moment in my life when I have not felt the love of my family. We were a family that would have killed for each other - and we still are.
Family life was wonderful. The streets were bleak. The playgrounds were bleak. But home was always warm. My mother and father had a great relationship. I always felt 'safe' there.
My entire adult life has been devoted to family and career, each adding to the other in many rewarding ways. I have never felt that I had to set a pattern for my writing and teaching.
I don't wear much makeup, except during work. I felt lucky to be chosen to be a model. I used to joke, 'The next best thing to winning the lottery is having a beauty contract.'
I didn't appreciate the young woman that I was, or my young beauty, because I was so obsessed with the fact that I felt fat. It's never good to add to anybody else's suffering. It's an important topic to really get the gravity and the importance of -...
I took myself out of the business to study film at NYU and the School of Visual Arts. I grew up on movie sets and was fascinated with the camera and behind-the-scenes work. I felt it would help my career as an actor if I knew all aspects of film.
I never lost my interest in acting but I did lose my interest in the business and what I had to go through to make a film. I felt saturated, you know, like a sponge when it's saturated - it's not good.
Books are such quiet things - created in silence, read in silence - yet publishing a book has become a very noisy business. I've been noisy, too. I felt like I had to be in order to connect with my readers.
You have to learn to overcome those feelings when somebody is negative about a production you love or if that production doesn't do well commercially. After 'Gone With the Wind', I felt older. I even thought about quitting the business.
We knew when we started the Daily Muse, we wanted a recruiting-focused business model rather than an advertising-focused one. We felt like publishers were being forced to go to more and more extreme lengths to monetize through advertising.
And at that point, I think my experience in covering the subject helped me. I think editors felt comfortable with the idea of me telling this story because I had demonstrated that I know this business pretty well.
