I try to be a good daughter, as I believe in karma and feel that how you are with your parents is directly proportionate to what you receive in your life. I am a big oneness follower, and our gurus have told us that if you want to achieve external ha...
I think for some actors, the fame is an unfortunate by-product of the work. I don't feel quite like that. Don't get me wrong: I'm very, very steadfast about wanting to keep my personal life personal and making sure that I have plenty of time with my ...
I don't like to see projects that are all black or all white. It's how life is. I do like to make sure that I do a nice black family film; that's like keeping my home base. I do other things, but I like to always come back to a positive family film, ...
We certainly want those at the top to do well, but if you base your entire presidency and your entire economic platform on helping them do even better, you're missing what makes the economy tick. Because not everyone has been as fortunate as Mitt Rom...
My own experience with being interviewed is mixed. I suppose they're a part of my job, and as I would like readers to connect with my books, I do them. I've also made many lifelong friends whom I first encountered as interviewers - as a writer, they'...
That's the great thing about being an actor: Stuff shows up that you never thought was going to go down. You get to play or experience an area of the world that - you know, I live a pretty simple life, I'm not much of an adventurer. I like my couch a...
For a while, I was saying 'no' way too often. I turned down 'An Officer and A Gentleman,' 'Splash' and 'Midnight Express.' I could name you tons more. I would go off and experience life instead of working - I was learning to fly jets, went on an Afri...
Suppose you could be hooked up to a hypothetical 'experience machine' that, for the rest of your life, would stimulate your brain and give you any positive feelings you desire. Most people to whom I offer this imaginary choice refuse the machine. It ...
As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - th...
So I've seen life as one long learning process. And if I see - you know, if I fly on somebody else's airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one, which it wasn't in - 21 years ago, then I'd think, well, you know, maybe I can create the kind...
The first of the four noble truths of Buddhism, that there is suffering in life, was enormously important to me. No one had ever said it out loud. That had been my experience, of course, but no one had ever talked about it. I didn't know what to do w...
I believe that you can, by taking some simple and inexpensive measures, lead a longer life and extend your years of well-being. My most important recommendation is that you take vitamins every day in optimum amounts to supplement the vitamins that yo...
I wake up every morning happy for where I am in life. It's not all about the cooking, but the fact that I can contribute by using my influence to help people all over the country. In the last two years, my partners and I have fed more than 10 million...
Good food and a warm kitchen are what makes a house a home. I always tried to make my home like my mother's, because Mom was magnificent at stretching a buck when it came to decorating and food. Like a true Italian, she valued beautification in every...
People say to me 'You're a big Hollywood star', and I find it so funny. I still feel as though I'm the girl from Golders Green. I lead such a boring, normal life. I still go shopping in Sainsbury's. If the ability to do that was taken away from me, I...
We never intend to lose our jobs, break up with our live-in loves, or face any number of the curveballs life throws our way. But they happen all the same, so have a bailout plan just in case. Sounds corny, but I call this the 'freedom fund' because i...
I was raised by a single mother who made a way for me. She used to scrub floors as a domestic worker, put a cleaning rag in her pocketbook and ride the subways in Brooklyn so I would have food on the table. But she taught me as I walked her to the su...
The worst thing a man can admit is 'I'm not 100 percent fulfilled by my family.' But it doesn't mean he doesn't love his family. I love my family, but I still want to work; I still want challenges. It took me a while to fall in love with the responsi...
Literary men now routinely tell their readers about their divorces. One literary man who reviews books wrote, in reviewing a study of Ruskin, that he had never read a book by Ruskin but that the study confirmed him in his belief that he didn't want t...
I've never forgotten what it's like to be in your early twenties, which is not a particularly easy time. You've left your family, you've left the strictures of high school, and you're trying to break free and form yourself but you have to support you...
I feel I'm able to get rid of any demons lurking in my psyche through my writing, which leaves me free to create all of this and to enjoy our family life, stepping away from all the fictional traumas and the dramas. If I write about family in crisis,...
