Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker cor...
As children, our imaginations are vibrant, and our hearts are open. We believe that the bad guy always loses and that the tooth fairy sneaks into our rooms at night to put money under our pillow. Everything amazes us, and we think anything is possibl...
The Project Angel Food Program's mission is to nourish the body and spirit of men, women and children affected by HIV/AIDS and other serious illness. The Project Angel Food Program delivers free and nutritious meals prepared with love. We act out of ...
I've never had a very closely connected family. My parents split up when I was young and I was living with my mom for a little while, then I was kind of just on my own really young. It wasn't some kind of global tragedy, it was just never really a ve...
My own mother, my sister and nearly all the women in my family had full-time jobs as mothers. They were wonderful at it. They drove their children back and forth to soccer, skating lessons, piano lessons, private schools, but I sensed, even in my own...
I've been a fortunate girl: I grew up in a family that loved me from day one. I feel well grounded and lucky from that. So everything else is a bonus, because I grew up in this family that I adored, and adored me, and I think when you have that, you ...
If the parents are too busy to read, it's a safe bet the children will feel the same way. Set aside time for family reading each night. It doesn't matter so much what the kids read, as long as you provide them space for reading and a sense that it is...
I don't think it ever does any harm in any business to feel that there is someone there who cares about it. If you look at any business, fashion being the most obvious, the aura, or the reality of the designer, is part of what creates it. It's true i...
Growing up in Nashville, especially in a music business family, means growing up with knowledge that seems like common sense until later in life when you realize people spend thousands of dollars a semester trying to learn or pretending to learn whil...
I think I've got my business notions and my sense for that sort of thing from my dad. My dad never had a chance to go to school. He couldn't read and write. But he was so smart. He was just one of those people that could just make the most of anythin...
I used to sneak up to the 8th floor and watch Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo rehearsing 'Saturday Night Live' and could only wonder if I would ever have the chance to be funny. It took me five years to go up the two stories, but it is such a sense of f...
My mom is just someone who's easy to talk to and hang with. My sister, it's always cool to be able to help her out with things. My brother is fun when we're just joking and messing around. And my dad is someone who's helpful with my music and easy to...
I don't think any particular painters have inspired me, except in a general sense. It was more a matter of corroboration. The visual arts, from Manet onwards, seemed far more open to change and experiment than the novel, though that's only partly the...
But only 'rich' people by definition have the 'extra' money to buy things and invest to create economic growth. Do we really want to tax that 'extra' money away - and give it to the government to spend? Does that make any economic sense outside of po...
I have an American son and an American partner, so marriage might logistically make sense at one point. My partner is a stay-at-home father, so if he wants to be on my health plan, or tax wise, or maybe on paper we want to have our I's dotted and our...
I'd love to have a program like 'Dr. Laura.' I studied psychology at the University of Miami, and when I rode the bus home from school, perfect strangers would strike up conversations with me and end up telling me their life stories. I think they cou...
It's what all actors try to do, really, to just preserve the child inside them because their imagination is quite available. I think partly it's because they're still making sense of the world. They haven't boxed everything up so neatly as most adult...
As a young man, I saw families prosper without reading because there were always sufficient opportunities for willing workers who could follow simple instructions. This is no longer the case. Children who don't read are, in the main, destined for les...
I'm not denying that depression can be spiritually induced. Guilt from having wronged and hurt others can bring it on. A sense of having failed to live out the will of God can give rise to depression. Certainly the fear of death and what might follow...
I always had a sense that I would fall in love with Tokyo. In retrospect I guess it's not that surprising. I was of the generation that had grown up in the '80s when Japan was ascendant (born aloft by a bubble whose burst crippled its economy for dec...
Whether it's an $11 flip-flop or a $2 key ring or a $2,000 dress, they're all done with integrity. They're all done with a design sense. As long as the creativity exists, then I don't think it's a sellout. A sellout is putting your name on any piece ...
