The very first time I ever heard anything of mine on the radio, I was in New Jersey, and I was in my teens. I did my first record, which was an old standard called 'My Mother's Eyes.' It was the old Georgie Jessel theme. I heard it on local radio out...
When you actually take the time to go over to somebody's office and personally thank them - whether their office is in a cockpit of an airplane, or in a break room - that's an actual manifestation of interest in them. You need to take the time to sho...
A lot of times, I think that what I do for a living has no integrity. 'Once Upon A Time' has changed that to a certain extent because the reaction we get from children out in the world is so fulfilling, I cannot even articulate it. There's nothing li...
There are several reasons to oppose tax increases. First, every dollar of tax increase is a dollar you didn't get in spending restraint. Two, if you walk into the Democrats' Andrews-Air-Force-Base, Lucy-with-the-Football trick for the third time in a...
Comic-strip artists generally have very modest ambitions. Day to day, we labor to fit together all these little moving parts - a character or two, a few lines of dialogue, framing, pacing, payoff - but we certainly don't think of them adding up over ...
By five or six, when the heels start to hurt, I kick off my shoes and walk bare feet. But that's not a big deal. Nobody else is at the office at that time, and as for singing loudly, I don't sing loudly. I might hum a tune at times when I am thinking...
We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it's a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so t...
I wrote my first novel in the same conditions as most first novelists - I had a full-time job, I shared an apartment, I had no time - and so I became a compulsive outliner of everything. Ever since then, my process has consisted of trying to forcibly...
I see bad stuff on the street all the time that I don't do anything about. I do bad stuff myself all the time. The goal is not to somehow be perfect - that's silly, that's naive. The goal is to just recognize there are choices in front of us, and to ...
I had three weeks of prep on 'Wolfman,' a ridiculously inadequate amount of time to try to bring together the fractured and scattered pieces of the production. I had taken the job mostly because I had a cash flow problem, the only time in my career I...
I think no matter what you do you go through stages when you play. There was a number of times when I didn't do very well or was tired. It was too much to combine school and tennis altogether. Parents need to step in and say, take a little time off, ...
After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think tha...
'Friday Night Lights' was kind of like my college years because I did four seasons of that. It was my first series. It was the most time I had with one character, and kind of growing and evolving with the character over that long of a span of time, i...
I've been thinking recently about all the qualities you need in order to be an actor. First and foremost, you've got to have a thick skin and give out an 'I don't give a monkey's what you think' kind of vibe, while at the same time really caring what...
When I ask people how much time they spend not doing their job - time spent on 'work-about-work' or phone calls or e-mails - people regularly tell me 60, or even 90 percent. So if Asana could take that down closer to zero, we could potentially double...
When do you know it's time to say, 'OK, that's it?' That is the most difficult part of any decision like that because you don't want to throw the 'R' word out there. I've mentioned it a couple times, but not in the sense that I'm doing it. That word ...
There's so much material out there that's unnecessarily racist. It takes a shot at what is 'urban' or demonstrates blackness with some sassy, neck-jiving character that's not even relevant to the plot. I see it time and time again, and it doesn't mov...
By the time you are in your thirties, most of the time, you've got a job, you can pay for your rent, you can create this nice world around you. And still, you're only in your thirties - you're not that far away from your twenties, which is when you'r...
I was very fortunate, because I don't think many people get to spend time with their great-grandfathers. So, he passed away when I was 15, so I spent a lot of time with him. We lived together. He traveled a lot, but when he was here, we lived togethe...
When you multitask, you believe you're being exceptionally productive, but really, you're fooling yourself. Each time you switch tasks, you have to backtrack a little and remind yourself where you are in the process and what's next. Invariably. you a...
If you can predict where the market's going, just do what you can predict. If you can't, which is the presumption of dollar cost averaging or time cost averaging, either one, then you're trying to ease in. But if the market rises more than it falls m...
