I want to be able to raise my kid. I was totally being a martyr about it at first, thinking I could totally do it on my own, which I did for a while. I've hired a babysitter before, but as for a full-time caregiver... for a control freak like me, it ain't gonna happen!

There is a tendency for writers to be most exciting by whatever they just wrote. Sometimes that excitement is warranted. Sometimes on further listen it's not as good as something they did a couple of years ago, but it's just not in their sights at that particular time.

When I was 13, I did become a Christian. And so it was when I was 13, that I thought... I just... I really saw a good example in Jesus and how he was just so... such a tremendous radical love and service of the poor. I just thought, 'Man, why can't we all do the same?'

Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.

I started ninth grade a week after everybody else had started, and I didn't know anybody. I was in a chorus class, and they asked me to bring my guitar to school one day, which I did, and all of a sudden, people knew me... in the halls, people would start saying hello.

My best friend and I went to sleep-away camp every summer. We'd share stories of making out with boys, but we never did, so we made it all up. My real first kiss was at a friend's house when I was in junior high. He was such a good kisser, and we're still close friends!

Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties.

With Comedy Central, they produced it and did everything - I just had to walk up there and tell the jokes - whereas with Netflix, I was heavily, creatively involved, from the logo to the lighting of the room to selecting the venue to selling the tickets and promoting it.

I feel like I would be a hypocrite not to use my platform to speak up for people who are facing oppression in this country. I did it and I still do it because I believe it's worth letting people know that if we do this together, if we stand up together we can make change.

Vocally and stylistically, we'd have different kinds of songs come on the radio, and people didn't realize it was the same band. A lot of the time, a casual fan would come see us and go, 'I didn't know that you guys did that song. I didn't know that was you!' That was us!

The support of my mother has made such a difference in my life, sacrificing everything to make sure that we went to school, did our homework, got an education. That was one person supporting me, and it takes more than one person in our community to help raise our children.

It is possible to become discouraged about the injustice we see everywhere. But God did not promise us that the world would be humane and just. He gives us the gift of life and allows us to choose the way we will use our limited time on earth. It is an awesome opportunity.

We never had the most money, but my parents always did their best to take care of me and my brother. I had a real small but tight group of friends, and we would just ride our bikes all day after school and play video games, or we would actually wrestle out in the backyard.

They saw that it was a passion of mine from really young... My parents did a good job. They wanted me to win. They let me do all these things. If some old guy came to the house asking, 'I want your kid to sign a contract,' they were so open to it. Yeah, I credit them loads.

You should make something. You should bring something into the world that wasn't in the world before. It doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't matter if it's a table or a film or gardening-everyone should create. You should do something, then sit back and say, 'I did that.'

For so long, black conservatives have not been able to have a voice; people who have bi-racial children, people in bi-racial relationships, it has been so black and white. I blame Obama. His eight years in office did a lot of damage in terms of race relations in this country.

After college, I knew I wanted to work in comedy, so the first thing I did was go to where the comedy was. I moved from Charlottesville to Chicago, because that's where The Second City and Improv Olympics are. You have to go wherever you need to go to study what interests you.

I did a Coca-Cola commercial when I was about two and a half years old, and then me and my family were extras in a bunch of Westerns. I loved dressing up and stepping into this imaginary world, and it was fun to get outside of my tiny little town with a bunch of movie weirdos.

I've always thought that a lot of the problems in the world would be solved if a spaceship did arrive, then anyone with one head and two arms and two legs would be your brother! It wouldn't matter where they were from or what they believed or anything. It might be good for us.

When I was 12, we began hosting exchange students from Norway, Sweden, Japan and Spain. I soon realized there was a whole world out there. I was determined to spend my sophomore year in high school abroad. My school taught only Spanish, but I wanted to go to France, and I did.

Well, you know, a lot of people look at the negative things, the things that they did wrong and - which I do. But I like to stress on the things I did right, because there are certain things that I like to look at from a positive standpoint that are just positive reinforcement.

I still sing, but completely for my own pleasure. I play a nightclub singer in 'Sparkle,' but I'd like to pursue it a bit more. I sang at a friend's 60th at Claridge's the other month; I did 'Baby It's Cold Outside' with the actor Hilton McRae, and 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow.'

I've not always played well for City, but I'd never been the scapegoat, coming off at half-time when in my head I thought I was having a decent game. It was weird, unnatural, it had never happened to me before and it felt like no matter what I did it wasn't good enough any more.

Our quarterbacks were getting hurt; a couple got kicked out of school. The coach asked who wanted to try out for QB. I went and tried out, and from there on, I was a quarterback. I was ineligible in 10th grade until spring, so I did baseball. I started in left field and pitched.

Until I was about 13, somehow I managed to assume that everyone reacted to everything just about as I did. I took it for granted that everyone shared my passion for overcast skies. It came as quite a shock when I discovered that there were actually people who preferred sunshine.

I'm happy that the sacrificing, the hard training, the travel, the time being away from the family, is going to stop. So I'm happy; I'm glad about that. But I'm also terrified. Frightened. Because, I mean, in my whole adult life, cycling was the most consistent thing I ever did.

Every man's heart one day beats its final beat. His lungs breathe a final breath. And if what that man did in his life makes the blood pulse through the body of others, and makes them bleed deeper and something larger than life, then his essence, his spirit, will be immortalized.

As for facial hair, I think I decided it was a good look after graduate school. I always shave it myself and trim my own beard. I change the look depending on the role. For 'Million Dollar Baby,' I had no facial hair. For 'Men in Black 3,' I had no facial hair but did wear a wig.

The difference between us and them, between you and success, is not that you never fail, but it's how you recover from those failures - is that you keep getting up time and time again. You figure out what you did wrong, and then you make it right. I say that to my kids every day.

Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college.

In New Orleans, bounce music was prevalent. That was all they wanted to hear. It was new and trendy, and it was hot, and it was taking off. Artists were coming out of everywhere. They did some great songs, some really catchy, fun songs. That was just the feel of New Orleans music.

I think of Harriet Muse as one fierce lady. She couldn't read. She had no education. She did labor her whole life. And she stood up to Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey at a time where she was told where to work, where to sit, and she demanded that they pay attention to her.

My first book was called, 'Mountain, Get Out of My Way,' where I did an autobiographical sketch, if you will, looking back at myself and looking back at things in my life, and juxtaposing them against things that are happening in other people's lives and trying to be motivational.

I have always been fascinated by the way things work and how they came to take the form that they did. Writing about these things satisfies my curiosity about the made world while at the same time giving me an opportunity to design a new explanation for the processes that shape it.

The greatest gift of all time is that you can make creation infectious because people spend less time being negative... If you log all the time with negativity in the while world, I wonder how much better the world would be if people sat down and did something positive. It spirals.

I get people who come up to me and are like, 'You make me wanna live my dream.' I was them, so I'm like, 'Me, out of all people? No way.' Eddie Guerrero did that for me, so to have little girls and guys tell me I inspire them, I didn't know that came with the job, but it's so cool.

I always had short hair, and I hated my short hair. I was always mistaken for a boy, but my mom wouldn't let me change my hair because she was always chasing me around with a hairbrush, and it was always tangled, so she just would cut it off, and she's right: short hair did suit me.

I first moved to Denver to work with a group called YWAM, 'Youth With a Mission.' I was a kid - I was 18 - and did some work with homeless people. Really, trying to convert people is sort of an awful position to find yourself in, so I quickly, on my own, grew out of religious ideas.

I always like it when I eat myself out of breath. That's a good boost to my day. You know, I'm eating, and I go, 'Oooohhh.' It's better a few moments later when you get to think about it, when you're like, 'Why did I just stop to take a deep breath? Oh yeah, my body also needs air.'

In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they'd never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.

March is Cerebral Palsy Awareness Month. Don't feel bad if you did not know that. I didn't, either, until someone recently slapped a picture of a green ribbon and a message wishing me a 'Happy CP Awareness Month' on my Facebook page. I always thought March was Women's History Month.

I won two Golden Globes, and there was a long, long period in between the wins. That might be explained by the fact that when I first won the award, for '3rd Rock on the Sun,' I satirically compared aliens on the show to the Foreign Press Association. And they did not take that well.

Personally, I would not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had it before we were born yet did not complain. Shall we whine because we know it will return? It is Elysium enough for me, at any rate.

So, I remember when I was a kid, I was waiting for my mom to come home when she was working late, and, you know, I was like, 'Oh my God, what happened to her? Is she OK? Did something happen to her getting in the car?' I was a little kid. But those are actually early onsets of anxiety.

Did you hear the one about the elderly Jew on his deathbed who sent for a priest, after declaring to his astonished relatives that 'I want to convert.' Asked why he would become a Catholic, after living all his life as a Jew, he answered: 'Better one of them should die than one of us.'

I'm scared by the enormous amount of bottled water being consumed today, instead of people drinking filtered tap water. Did you know that nearly 90 percent of those plastic bottles are not recycled and wind up in landfills where it takes thousands of years for the plastic to decompose?

When I was 5, my father was very much my hero. And he ran for political office in a very thankless campaign for a very thankless position. And he did it because his mother had instilled in him, if you are someone who has the capacity to make a great change, you have the responsibility.

One of the things we did at PayPal was collaborative filtering and machine learning: looking at patterns of human behavior. We used it there to predict when people would try to cheat the system to get money. But you can predict pretty much any behavior with a certain amount of accuracy.

When I did '1,2,3,4' on 'Sesame Street' they'd rewritten the song and made it about counting. At first, I balked. I was like, 'Counting to four? That's where we're going with this?' Then they sent me appearances by other people like James Blunt doing 'You're Beautiful' as 'My Triangle.'

Take stock of your thoughts and behavior. Each night ask yourself, when were you negative when you could have been positive? When did you withhold love when you might have given it? When did you play a neurotic game instead of behaving in a powerful way? Use this process to self-correct.

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