When I played the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year's Eve, I got to bring Wiley, my 85-pound black lab. He's responsible for my favorite New Year's memory of all: At the end of the show, he ran onstage and then out across all the tables in the sh...
According to my parents, I was supposed to have been a nice, churchgoing Swiss housewife. Instead I ended up an opinionated psychiatrist, author and lecturer in the American Southwest, who communicates with spirits from a world that I believe is far ...
I used to do this big rant at the end of some gigs with Ben Folds Five. The band broke into this big heavy metal thing and I started as a joke to scream in a heavy metal falsetto. I found myself saying things like: Feel my pain, I am white, feel my p...
What destroys more self-confidence than any other educational thing in America is being assigned to some remedial math when you get into some college, and then it's not taught very well and you end up with this sense of, 'Hey, I can't really figure t...
You know, I'm playing the Mirage in Vegas, the main room... About 5 percent of all comics end up as the main headliner on the Vegas Strip, so that's a big deal for me. Getting to do my stand-up the way I have this summer is really what I've dreamed o...
Burning carbon-based substances like oil, gas, and especially coal, produces billions of tons of extra carbon dioxide each year. Methane gas from cows and pigs and other animals on our large farms ends up in the atmosphere as well, trapping more of t...
We writers constantly try to build up our own confidence by getting published, making sales, winning prizes, joining cliques or proclaiming theories. The passion to write constantly strips this vanity aside and forces us to confront that loneliness a...
Though life can feel downhill like a land slide that just hit us like a Mack truck. When we come to the end of ourselves. With faith in God who understands. We find that God is enough to meet our present, and future needs. For it is His nature to hel...
I miss 'EastEnders.' I loved it. But I was exhausted when I left. They asked me to go back recently - they've asked a few times. I am tempted! But my husband Scott says you have to really think about it. Because, towards the end, I was so exhausted a...
Regardless of what you want to call it, guys need some type of spirituality they can grab onto. If it's Christianity, which is a very structured approach, or if it's something that's a little more open-ended... like, Zen's something you can make your...
I have the embarrassing thing where often if you're watching a film, you kind of go through the emotions and the thought stages that your character went through, but you sort of do it with Tourette's. So I end up often crying when I'm crying, and loo...
My personal opinion is that, if you're a professional writer, that you do have quotas. So every day I do try to write 800-1,200 words. I don't always achieve it, and the reality is that a lot of the words I write will end up on the cutting-room floor...
For a dying man it is not a difficult decision [to agree to become the world's first heart transplant] ... because he knows he is at the end. If a lion chases you to the bank of a river filled with crocodiles, you will leap into the water convinced y...
I cried most days working on the first draft. The last scenes were the hardest. I had a feeling where I wanted to end - the exact note - but I couldn't see how to get there. Sarah Murphy, my editor, asked the right questions to help me. I think of 'T...
I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from t...
I catch myself judging myself as that 13-year-old boy, who, of course, rightfully points out that he is only a child. And my membership - well, I was drafted into the Waffen-SS and didn't exactly volunteer, which was just as idiotic. I wanted to be o...
The fact is, when people choose to be brave instead of smart, their courage is generally so threatening to those who are smart rather than brave that they end up being maligned, not congratulated. This is what the Bible says we can expect.
If 'Mystery Train' is my Nixon book and 'Lipstick Traces' my Reagan book, 'Invisible Republic' is my Bill Clinton book. I really liked Clinton. He made me proud to be part of this country again. For all of his failings, the way he put all that he'd d...
I just want to tell you what it's like not to have Planned Parenthood... you have to give your kids Ramen noodles at the end of the month to fill up their little bellies so they won't cry. You have to give them mayonnaise sandwiches. They get very fe...
And it’s great to have all these readers and fans who, for the most part, are very nice people, saying they love the books and the TV show. But there are so many of them and it just doesn’t end. Oh, and ‘selfies’! If I could clap my hands and...
I mean, in 'Big' and 'Pleasantville,' it's a journey that the characters go on where I think they come to kind of meet themselves at the end and who they actually are and give full voice to who they actually are. And that, you know, obviously fascina...
