Every once in a while I get the highly inappropriate proposal which is like, 'Wow, Really! You don't even know me and I don't know you at all, and you want that to happen? Tonight? Ok, I get off work at 7.30.'
I'm a full-time writer, which means I have the entire day to get my work done. But that can also be bad, because that means I have the entire day to get in my way.
In the sense that people who produce things and work get rewarded, statistically. You don't get rewarded precisely for your effort, but in Russia you got rewarded for being alive, but not very well rewarded.
The one thing I've learned in the last ten years is that successful artists don't get paid to write and sing songs, they get paid for the psychological roller coaster they're going to have to ride. That's the hard work.
When I was young in L.A. and I couldn't get into clubs or restaurants, I would call imitating celebrities and get a table, and it would work often. I was either Stallone or Mickey Rourke: 'This is Sly. I may be late, but my buddy Hank will be there e...
I burned out on AIDS and did no AIDS work for a couple of years. I was so angry that people were still getting this disease that nobody can give you - you have to go out and get it!
When you have a lot of opportunities, which I am blessed to have had in terms of my work, you get into the habit of not paying attention to certain specifics. And as we get busy, anything we do is the same thing.
People always tell me, 'Don't work so much', but I can't help it. I feel like all the things I've done are important to get to this adult stage and now I'm getting all these adult offers, so it's working.
A big part of who I am is just the way I was raised. Nobody is better than anyone else, and if you really work hard, you might get lucky and get what you want.
I try to get that across in the work, to try to, if I'm lucky, to make this world a little bit better for all of us before I check out. And that's if I'm lucky, I don't always get to have that privilege but I try always.
That thought process that somehow other people have to be worse off in order for you to be better off does not work. People get on boats people jump fences to get away from that kind of thought process.
As a prosecutor, I got a paycheck for coming to work every day. I didn't get a promotion when I won, and I didn't get a demotion when I did a bad job.
I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.
In my game, you get brokenhearted a bit. You do a play, get a bad review in the papers... actors are sensitive; you think of all the work you've done, and it breaks your heart, but you learn to shrug it off and to carry on.
If I leave my computer, I'm probably not going to get back for hours. If I take a few minutes to answer questions and go web surfing, then guilt kicks in and I get back to work.
If it's not in New York, let's say it's in St. Louis, then they've got to find a place or get with someone who knows about the work... they've got to find a place like that and do scenes, and then try to get in plays.
If you are messing around all day and then scream for certainty, you're not going to get it. If you spend energy and do the work and develop that certainty, you'll get to where you need to be, even if you don't know exactly where that is.
Breast cancer is being detected at an earlier, more treatable stage these days, largely because women are taking more preventive measures, like self-exams and regular mammograms. And treatment is getting better too.
Personally, I don't think we could do such a show if we didn't get along. The subtext of all this is that we're women in a show so we can't possibly get along. It's not like they write about The Sopranos like that.
If we want to get beyond this whole I'm-cool-because-I-care-about-women thing, what we really need to do is we have to start encouraging women to get engineering degrees in college.
As women get more powerful, they get less likable. I see women holding themselves back because of this, but if we start talking about the success-likability penalty women face, then we can do something about it.
