I'm of Russian-Jewish background. Like many Soviet Jews, my parents were engineers. My family migrated from Ukraine to Israel when I was six. They arrived in Israel with very little... Within a year of arriving in Israel, the Yom Kippur War happened.
I was desperate to go back to New York and when 9/11 happened, I feared moving to the bulls-eye and that was very hard because I have a lot of family there and I really had to question what I didn't like about this community.
I've learned through experience that you can't ever predict what's going to happen with any show. When I signed on to 'Ugly Betty,' I just prayed that I wouldn't get fired after the pilot, and four years later, I was still doing it.
When you come into my pieces, it's not an intellectual experience, it's a physical experience. It's coming at your body. There's light, there's sound, the lights in some pieces are going on and off. There's loud roaring sound happening.
There's this thing in TV that I find hysterical where the writers and creators will ask us if you want to know what happens to your character or if you want to experience it episode by episode. In the theatre, we always know the ending; we always kno...
Something mystical happens to every writer who goes to the Masters for the first time, some sort of emotional experience that results in a search party having to be sent out to recover his typewriter from a clump of azaleas.
When I think about my great conversations with Marlon Brando on the set of 'Morituri,' I think there's a story there, just as I do with my experience working with James Cameron on 'Titanic.' And then there are all my years on 'Y&R' and all that has h...
Traveling to Europe and traveling in the U.S.A. was a much different experience. 'On the Road' exemplified everything glamorous that was happening on this side of the planet. The book puts off some kind of sweet melody - part hope for the world, part...
I agree that the two-party system stomps on any kind of competition. A great first step is to open the presidential debates to all qualified candidates, including the Libertarians. If that happens, the Libertarian party will experience unprecedented ...
I went through my adolescence having this revelatory experience - I can have any music I want, and I can get it immediately. For me and for a lot of people I know, there's this musical eclecticism that happened.
Sometimes you read a script, and you just think, 'Wow, I would love to go and tell that story, and I don't even care what happens to the film, I would just love that experience.' And often, that mentality makes a great film.
I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.
In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them s...
The magic happens when you take facts and figures, features and benefits, decks and PowerPoints - relatively soulless information - and embed them in the telling of a purposeful story. Your 'tell' renders an experience to your audience, making the in...
It's happening: Lou Dobbs' dream come true and Silicon Valley's worst nightmare. We're already seeing the reverse brain drain as smart immigrants take their U.S. educations and experience building companies and creating technology back to their home ...
When you label so much of what happens to you as 'bad,' it reinforces the feeling that you are a powerless pawn at the mercy of outside forces over which you have no control. And - this is key - labeling something a bad thing almost guarantees that y...
I happen to think it's the politics that makes you electable, but the reason for that is politicians sometimes talk about electability as if it's just a matter of conning the public. Actually, it's a matter of persuading the public, and in my experie...
I say grace. I'm a big believer in grace. I happen to believe in a God that made all the food and so I'm pretty grateful for that and I thank him for that. But I'm also thankful for the people that put the food on the table.
Food can be very transformational, and it can be more than just about a dish. That's what happened to me when I first went to France. I fell in love. And if you fall in love, well, then everything is easy.
When food prices surge, poor families suddenly find themselves unable to afford enough nutritious food. If this happens during the first thousand days of a child's life, the damage to his or her body and mind can be permanent.
My mother and I were on welfare and food stamps until I was 18, so I've always had this ethos of, like, 'try and make a little bit of money now because you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.'
