When you first get money, you buy all these things so no one thinks you're mean, and you spread it around. You get a chauffeur and you find yourself thrown around the back of this car and you think, I was happier when I had my own little car! I could...
My dad, he worked rebar, an ironworker. Watching my pops get up every single morning, going into work, working hard - I think that really made me want to work that hard, wanted to make me get up early and go for a run or get a lift in or get some ext...
I was 17 when my body started changing, and I worried about what I did wrong. I went through a period where I didn't eat at all. I also had someone who was encouraging me to take diet pills. I pushed myself to the extreme because I woke up one day an...
I do what I love to do at the moment. If I wake up tomorrow and decide I want to dance, that's what I'd do. Or design clothes. I think I'd throw myself into whatever I'm doing now. It's not about abandoning what I was doing before, or giving up. It's...
Live-action has always been my focus and my passion. I love voice-over, and I definitely could see myself doing some voice-over, as much as I could, and even if I ended up doing only that for the rest of my life, and I could be successful at it, that...
I am practical by nature, and I'd heard that being a writer or an artist is a good way to starve! So I was an economics major at Oklahoma State, and then received an M.S. from Cornell in Agricultural Resource and Managerial Economics. I knew if I wan...
I really believe that the more distractions and fixes I remove from my life, the better I'll feel about myself. The biggest of those is Depeche Mode. It's the one marriage that survived, but I'm not sure it works - for me, anyway. Jumping on a plane ...
Every year I tell myself that I'm not going to read any reviews and then I do. We're all human and when I read something negative it hurts. I think when you write it's part of the game, you're going to get some good reviews and some bad reviews and t...
I don't know about living on an automatic pilot, but I've had times where I've decided to just test myself and my mettle, and for no good reason other than it's what life is. Even before I was acting, I had, like, one day in high school I decided to ...
In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter. The neighborhood I'd grown up in was homogeneously Hindu, Bengali-speaking, and middle-class. I didn't expect myself...
I never remember having a plan. All I could think about was how I was going to afford to get into college or where I was going to stay because I hated being at home. I didn't really have time to think about anything in the future. I didn't think abou...
I transcend earthly bounds. I never cease to amaze myself because I haven't yet found my limits. I am quite ready to accept the limits of what I can do, but every time I feel that way - boom! - God touches me and I do something that's even more stupe...
My parents have Google Alerts on me. So they'll often times send me an e-mail and be like, 'Hey did you know this?' And then I'll be like, 'Well, it is, like, my life. So yes, I did know that.' Or, 'That's not even true. I don't know where you read t...
One of the things I did to make myself feel better is that I kicked up my running even more. I knew that I had to stay active, that I had to keep living as if my life was actually going to unfold naturally because when you stop, when you freeze, and ...
Every time in my life when I have chosen to delay following inspired counsel or decided that I was an exception, I came to know that I had put myself in harm's way. Every time that I have listened to the counsel of prophets, felt it confirmed in pray...
Getting sober just exploded my life. Now I have a much clearer sense of myself and what I can and can't do. I am more successful than I have ever been. I feel very positive where I never did before, and I think that's all a direct result of getting s...
I asked myself, 'What are you going to do with your life? Are you going to be like everyone else or are you going to do what's right?' I just made a decision. I said, 'It's time to grow up. It's time to start living for the Lord, do things the right ...
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and in spite of what most people might have expected from a young girl growing up deaf, life for me was like one long episode of 'The Brady Bunch.' Despite whatever barriers were in my way, I imagined myself as Ma...
In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing an...
There were only two times in my life when I've actually felt down about things and gotten myself into a full mental mess. One of the times was in 1982. I had a horrible time for a few months and felt pretty desperate. Then again in 1984, for various ...
If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself... something else that...
