For me growing up, Christmas time was always the most fantastic, exciting time of year, and you'd stay up until three in the morning. You'd hear the parents wrapping in the other room but you knew that also, maybe, they were in collusion with Santa C...
I had eight brothers and sisters. Every Christmas my younger brother Bobby would wake up extra early and open everybody's presents - everybody's - so by the time the rest of us got up, all the gifts were shredded, ribbons off, torn open and thrown as...
Growing up with my dad, whenever I wanted to try something, he would let me try it but he wouldn't let me give up on it. If soccer was too tough and I said, 'I'm going to quit,' he'd be like, 'No, you're going to try everything and keep going at it.'
And I saw the sax line-up that he had behind him and I thought, I'm going to learn the saxophone. When I grow up, I'm going to play in his band. So I sort of persuaded my dad to get me a kind of a plastic saxophone on the hire purchase plan.
With plastic surgery, the general anesthetic is like a black-velvety sleep, and that's what death is - without waking up to someone clapping and going, 'Joan, wake up, it's all over and you're looking pretty'.
In school, when I got into upper-level math, there would be times when I would wake up from a dream and have - not an answer, exactly, but a direction to pursue. My writing has always been like that. I wake up from dreams knowing which direction to g...
Once you come up with a premise, you have to work out how it all happened. It's a bit like coming up with a spectacular roof design first. Before you can get it up there, you need to build a solid foundation and supporting structure.
If religion had a good purpose, then man would have created something great. But we're man: we mess up everything. We mess up nature. We mess up God. We take what is given to us and make it into what we think it should be.
There's great value to knitting or digging up your garden or chopping up vegetables for soup, because you're taking some time away from turning the pages, answering your emails, talking to people on the phone, and you're letting your brain process wh...
A great day in New York would be to wake up, get a cup of coffee and head up to Central Park for a nice walk. Then I'd go down to the East Village and stroll around. After that, maybe I'd go check out a museum or catch an indie film at the Angelika.
I thought, 'OK, Melissa Gilbert is playing my mom, and I'm playing her old role - no pressure.' So I went up to Melissa and said, 'It's such an honor playing your daughter,' and she smiled and said, 'Oh, shut up.' I thought, 'Great, a normal person.'
I think I have a very good reputation amongst the gay population and among the whole country because I stood up on the issue of gay rights. It is not easy to stand up on that issue when you are single and male in New York City. I did it anyway.
I think we probably will end up in America because he would be giving up much more to come and live here. If you want to work in film, that's really where you have to be. But I'm not sure that being an ex-pat is very good for one's sense of self.
We became friends as we became a band. Our friendship evolved as the band evolved. It had its ups and downs, but it was mostly ups for the four of us. We got along well almost all of the time. Hey! We liked each other and we still do.
I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.
I talk to our kids now that they are grown up, and I ask them about the experiences that had growing up that really had a powerful influence on the way they view the purpose of life. The experiences that really shaped their values - my wife and I hav...
My life is fairly normal. I didn't wake up one morning and find out that I'm suddenly a star, with people clamoring at me. I feel like I'm moving up the ladder just a little, which is fine.
Let me back up a little and tell you why I prefer writing to real life: You can rewrite. A novel, for example, can be cleaned up, altered, trimmed, improved. Life, on the other hand, is one big messy rough draft.
After 'The Real Thing,' I thought about giving up acting because it's difficult to have a rich life outside your work when you're an actress, a private life that can survive being picked up and put down. That's what I thought, anyway.
Growing up, I wasn't as comfortable expressing myself as I am now, and I think that's why I chose acting: because it's acceptable to have your feelings. It's a place that they want you to feel. Whereas in life, growing up, it was 'Be quiet!' and 'Kee...
When I was growing up, albums were my closest friends, as sad as that may sound - Joy Division's 'Closer,' or Echo and the Bunnymen's 'Heaven Up Here'... I had a more intimate relationship with those records than I did with most of the people in my l...
