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...
Something I learned when I was very young: with cooking, it doesn't matter where you are; you can always cook. You can end up in small village in Peru where somebody's cooking, take a spoon and taste it, and you might not be too sure what you're eati...
I love food. I mean, I really love food. I take pictures of my finest, funniest and most fascinating dishes, post them on Twitter, and send them to friends. I treat menus like classic literature, refusing to skip even one word. I read the description...
When you make a mistake and the devil comes and tells you 'You're no good,' you don't have to take on the guilt and condemnation he wants to put on you. No! You can immediately confess your mistake to God, thank Him for forgiving you and cleansing yo...
When 'Men's Health' reached out and said, 'Will you be on the 'Today Show' and do a fitness challenge?' I said, 'OK. I'm not showing them anything they don't already know.' But I'm going to take what some would argue is a negative or not substantive ...
I was the first in my family to go to college, and I waitressed all the way through, using my earnings to pay for a bachelor's degree first and then a master's. I resented classmates who didn't have to work real jobs, the ones who had the luxury of t...
The competition has improved tremendously. In 2003, I could teach a guy how to play poker in an hour and he could win some money. Today, it would take days. The game has gotten so much tougher. So I will spend my time with my family and play when I c...
I needed to take a break from performing, and from the Peas, to be happy. I craved female time, and time with my husband to feed my soul. My life now is about being balanced. I'm passionate about work and working out, seeing friends and family, and l...
I love being at home now, improving my cooking. I've got a really bad memory, so my first attempts were a disaster - I'd forget what ingredients to put in. But I do a lasagna that's a crowd-pleaser, and a good lemon drizzle cake, which I take to my m...
I was one those kids who had books on them. Before weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading, my family would frisk me and take the book away. If they didn't find it by this point in the procedur...
To say that a family is happy I think is to diminish it, taking out what is interesting. Growing up, I don't think my family was any happier or unhappier than anyone else's. My mother and father should have been divorced or never even married. On the...
A couple of months ago, I was down in Florida for the Food and Wine Festival. And this journalist grabbed me and said, 'How does it feel to be a TV guy? You're no longer in the restaurant business.' And I laughed. I asked him, 'How long do you think ...
When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn't have the courage to go. I was a tremendously shy person, almost pathologically shy. The thou...
Producing is so exciting because you can enable things to happen, whether it's like discovering a filmmaker who you're taking a chance on, protecting a battle and driving home at the end of the day just going, 'I'm so glad I stayed late at work and f...
I am going to take something I learned over in Israel. Their Independence Day is preceded the 24 hours before with Memorial Day, so it gives them a chance to serve and reflect and then celebrate. I am going to try to start that tradition here in Amer...
I think I'm drawn to more villain-type characters, because it's so cool to get to say all the things you want to say. In Hollywood, you get to this position where you have to bite your tongue so much. You take all your experiences of not being able t...
I love the fact that little kids think I'm a witch. A mum might come over and say 'I'm sorry to disturb you, but my daughter thinks you're in 'Harry Potter.' I'll say 'That's cool' and take the kid aside and say, 'I'm a witch. If you don't listen to ...
I am oblique; I think that has to do with my own nature. I like trying to do things which work on many levels, because I think it is terribly important to give an audience a lot of things they might not get as well as those they will, so that finally...
All of my life had been spent in the shadow of apartheid. And when South Africa went through its extraordinary change in 1994, it was like having spent a lifetime in a boxing ring with an opponent and suddenly finding yourself in that boxing ring wit...
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...
To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaki...
