People remember my last name because it's different, and people remember me in meetings because I dress differently from other people just because I'm a woman. Those kinds of things give you an opportunity and a spotlight, so use that to your advanta...
I'm a pragmatist. I think, as a woman, you have to be more careful. You have to be more communal, you have to say yes to more things than men, you have to worry about things that men don't have to worry about. But once we get enough women into leader...
Our real human nature is revealed better when we are confronted with limited situations, and I think that life itself is an immense accumulation of losses: we lose our childhood, we lose our virginity, we lose our parents, we lose our hair, we lose o...
Every single thing that you learn really just gives you more comfort. It's something I counsel kids all the time: if someone is willing to teach you something for free, take them up on it. Do it. Every single time. All it does is make you more likely...
From my mother I learned just how violent and unquenchable a woman's loneliness can be. She had been sheltered excessively by her husband and then, midway through her life, they divorced, and she was forced to earn her own living. It was as if after ...
At this stage of my life I would rather try and have some small impact within a company and suffer through those things than make such a big stink that nobody can trust to work with you. It's very important in an environment of a big institution that...
I spend several days at a time without enough sleep. At first, normal activities become annoying. When you are too tired to eat, you really need some sleep. A few days later, things become strange. Loud noises become louder and more startling, famili...
I look forward to the day when being called 'another Monica Lewinsky' refers to the hard work behind a master's degree in social psychology from the London School of Economics, after spending the first act of one's life deflecting the shame of a scan...
I'm not a big believer in trying to jam stuff down somebody's throat: 'You're going to do it my way.' I'd rather show by example and live my life and have people say, 'You know what, I want to live like Joel has. He's got peace and joy, and he seems ...
A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexuality, and that breaks my heart, because they're going to have to - high school's hard enough to overcome. Middle school is hard enough to overcome when we get out of it. They say life is what you spend ...
I find myself drawn to that period where children are about to leave childhood behind. When you're 12 years old, you still have one foot in childhood; the other is poised to enter a completely new stage of life. Your innocent understanding of the wor...
Life is insanely robust, though we can make species go extinct, and this is the bad thing. So I always make the point that you can't say, 'Is it too late?' That is the terrible question, because either answer promotes inaction. If it's too late, you ...
It gets easier as you get older because life deals its particular hand, and our experiences get deeper, richer, more profound. When I gave birth to my son, something happened. It is a huge thing for a woman: a whole set of emotions you never had befo...
Tell me how a person judges his or her self-esteem, and I will tell you how that person operates at work, in love, in sex, in parenting, in every important aspect of existence - and how high he or she is likely to rise. The reputation you have with y...
One posthumous measure of a person's life is how often you imagine his impossible return to deal with some event he never lived to encounter. You picture his reactions, his advice, his sage commentary and humorous asides. For instance, I think about ...
One of the most important times in my life was the first time that I remember seeing my daddy get onstage and play music with a bunch of guys. All of them playing something different at the same time and all becoming one, and me soaking that in at 5 ...
I think the answer of course is that space and time are not these hard external objects. Again we're, scientists have been building from one side of nature (physics) without considering the other side (life in consciousness). Neither side exists with...
What I tell young couples that are getting married is: you're going to have quarrels, and on some things, you're just going to have to agree to disagree. And when you go to bed at night, kiss each other and tell each other that you love each other. D...
My father and I used to tussle about me becoming an actor. He's from strong, Presbyterian Scottish working-class stock, and he used to sit me down and say, 'You know, 99 percent of actors are out of work. You've been educated, so why do you want to s...
Life is all about evolution. What looks like a mistake to others has been a milestone in my life. Even if people have betrayed me, even if my heart was broken, even if people misunderstood or judged me, I have learned from these incidents. We are hum...
I would love it if we made more comparisons between current issues and issues of the past. Maybe we'd realize that sometimes 'current issues' and 'past issues' are one and the same. Our world's people still fight over natural resources, kill in the n...
