My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn'...
It's been a long struggle. But we've made huge progress. I mean, when I started at Berkeley, women weren't allowed to be part of the band. No women were allowed into the male faculty club. I mean, I was there. I remember that! The worlds were so divi...
For me, for the type of addict I am, when I start getting those swirly thoughts and stuff, and they talk about slippery places, slippery people and slippery things, you know, I need to - I needed to take my cell phone and eliminate all the phone numb...
I've got a vibe going on with a lot of what I've been doing, and to completely change it based off of me having a child might be a little confusing. I'm sure as my life goes forward, and she starts growing up, there will be a lot more things to inclu...
The first thing I do when I come home is check the refrigerator for cats because I'm convinced that if one dies, my husband will hide it in there because I don't cook and so I won't see it. I do drink Cokes, though ,so technically he should hide the ...
I love to talk about the drums and music. I started playing drums when I was probably six and played a lot until I was about ten or eleven years old. So, I guess five or six years where I played. I had a drum set at home, and I would just bang on it....
You can make something big when young that will carry you through life. Look at all the big startups like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They were all started by very young people who stumbled on something of unseen value. You'll k...
To be honest, the core reason why I became an actor was that I didn't want to go to school. That's where it started. I hated opening my history books and my English books, but then, of course, you grow older. I went to film school in New York, and th...
Home is where I am. Sadly, I don't need a history to be able to exist somewhere. When I was still very young, my father told me: 'Look, we will always have to move, again and again.' I thought that was marvelous! That's how I got used to thinking tha...
I tend to learn things physically - I guess it's my dance training. I never want to make too many choices too soon - so, while I am thinking about the character and thinking about her history, which is very vague in terms of what is given in the text...
On Memorial Day, I was out floating on Lake Norman and came across Denny Hamlin. We struck up a conversation, and one of the first things we were talking about was how much it helped him when he started racing the Cup car and how much it helped his N...
When I first met my husband, he had a very good job - company car, pension plan, grudging respect from his staff - the lot. I, on the other hand, was badly paid and devoid of ambition. Then I had a couple of books published and confounded all expecta...
My mom was a professional. My dad and mom met each other in a movie called 'New Faces of 1937.' My mom went under the name Thelma Leeds, and she did a few movies, and she was really a great singer, and when she married my dad and started to have a fa...
I went to hockey camp at Michigan because my dad has some relatives in the Ann Arbor area. We went to visit them as kids, and you start to learn the language from being around people. At the same time, when I got to college, I thought my English was ...
My dad was pretty strict. We didn't even get to watch any of his movies until I was, like, 17 years old. I didn't even see his stand-up, really, until I started doing stand-up, and that was when I was 22. So he's pretty strict. We had curfews until I...
I was this kid, and I was scared to death of all these pros around me... My head would shake, and my hands would shake, and I discovered if I kept my head down and looked up, my head would not shake, so I started to do that when I could, when it was ...
Corporate America was hurling offers at her. Thinking even bigger, wanting even more, she had dreams of starting a Martha Stewart magazine and starring in her own regularly scheduled Martha Stewart television show. Martha saw herself as Betty Crocker...
When I was 11 years old, I was bullied. It mainly started when I moved to California to pursue my dreams of being an actress. Kids back home in Texas, who I thought were my friends, were saying things behind my back. They said that I would never make...
If I'm with a man, is that going to prevent me from achieving my goal? What sacrifices will I have to make in terms of being myself, if I'm with a man? Something that young women find out really quickly is that when you start dating, all of a sudden ...
My husband's a little younger than me. When I first started dating him, I just fell mad for him. I made a deal with myself: I was like, 'I'm not gonna get weird about what the future might be. I'm just going to be in every moment I can and enjoy us t...
I'm not only a lawyer, I have a post doctorate degree in federal tax law from William and Mary. I work in serious scholarship and work in the United States federal tax court. My husband and I raised five kids. We've raised 23 foster children. We've a...
