Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel.

It was brilliant in LA. The kids were young enough for it not to disturb their education and it was an incredibly healthy lifestyle. The weather's so good that you're up every morning, walking in the canyons, playing tennis three times a week.

I've been doing a lot of work with my brilliant trainer Pat Manocchia, who has a gym called La Palestra. He's trained me for every big show I've done, every demanding 8-show week role that requires stamina, like 'Sunset Boulevard' and 'Gypsy.'

When I went to Spain two years ago, I only knew three Valencia players. I didn't know anything about La Liga, and within six months, I knew everything. I was speaking another language and knew everything about the game, so I am a fast learner.

LA's a very hard place to be unless you have people there that love you. It can be very, very lonely, and it can eat you up if you don't take care of yourself. In LA, nobody wants to talk to each other, everybody's giving each other catty looks.

I love jeans and T-shirts, but for red carpets, I like Oscar de la Renta, who is timeless. Marchesa celebrates the female form in an ethereal way. Donna Karan does an Urban Zen collection, which is eco-friendly. I love socially conscious fashion.

The 'Dangerous' album has producers like Tiny, who to me is very special. Also, Luny Tunes, Nesty La Mente Maestra, Nelly La Arma Secreta, Haze, and El Ingeniero. I wanted to use everyone who makes music in Puerto Rico and beyond to have variety.

I think at the end of the day the diversity has served as a major… that's what has determined the difference between The Roots and some of the other artists from our graduating class. I feel we followed the De La Soul, the Native Tongue blueprint.

The accent got lost somewhere along the way. I'm a little embarrassed about it. When I arrived in LA I assumed I'd be able to put on the American accent. It proved difficult so I had six months working with a dialect coach and it's become a habit.

Hollywood will put you in a box, so to speak. Some people will have seen you in 'La Bamba' or another dramatic film and think, 'Okay, that's what Lou does.' But they don't really have an idea of the range or diversity that I can bring to a project.

Atlantic's Jerry Wexler believes first-rate records are made by first-rate voices. He certainly has worked with enough of them: Clyde McPhatter, Joe Turner, La Vern Baker, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin.

You get the reality checks during the course of your adult life and your career, and you realize that as good as the money in boxing is, most of the time people most don't make Ray Leonard or Oscar De La Hoya money, even if you make very good money.

You go to LA, or you go to New York, and it's really fun to go there. But they're not grounded. Everybody is just competing all the time for the limelight. It's too much entertainment industry. There are too many choices. And it's distracting to me.

I think I would say 'The King's Speech' is surprisingly funny, in fact the audiences in London, Toronto, LA, New York commented there's more laughter in this film than in most comedies, while it is also a moving tear-jerker with an uplifting ending.

I'm always traveling, so I tend to online shop. My go-to sites are Net-a-Porter and Matches. I recently moved to N.Y.C. and frequently shop at Sur La Table for my kitchen; Flair home collection, Aedes de Venustas for all my favorite home fragrances.

The fans in Lake Charles, La., were crazy. The Freebirds would get their tires cut, so they started driving to the police station and having the police bring them to the show. The fans then cut the tires on the police car that brought The Freebirds.

There's too many actors in LA. I mean, I'll go out there from time to time, but I always find it pretty soul-destroying. I don't drive, and the people kind of rub me the wrong way. It's just not home. You know? It's not New York. It's not... my town.

I've always loved children's clothes - my grandmother actually owned a children's boutique in La Jolla, CA, for 30 years. I grew up visiting her and working in her store, and then my mom and I had a children's boutique together for five or six years.

My priorities are: I need to be good; I need to be well within for my children to be well within; and then the creative process flows, organically and smoothly. I'm not looking to experience what I went through in the 'Livin' La Vida Loca' days again.

I wanted to be a film composer because I heard scores that could stand alone, from 'Vertigo' to 'Star Wars' to 'La Dolce Vita,' because this music has so much history. They're weighed with the history of music. They come from somewhere, they have a past.

I consider Billy Keeler, Mike Tiernan, Ed Delihanty and Larrie La Joie the toughest hitters I had to pitch to, but I did not dread them. Remember, Hughie Duffy was a member of our team, so I did not face him. In my opinion, Duffy was the greatest hitter.

None of us can claim to be fair and square in love - and I'm definitely not a hypocrite! Humans are built to evolve with time. It depends on the nature of the relationship you share with a person. It is there today, tomorrow it may be gone; c'est la vie.

I'm very physical. I'm extremely active, and I would love to do something a little more sexy and dangerous, a la Sophia Loren, or funny and humorous, a la Woody Allen. Getting to do things along those lines would be extremely wicked and a dream come true.

I love Chicago. It's such a great town, and it's got great culture and great history, and it's not as extreme as LA or New York, and it's just- it's hard for me for work, because I don't live and work in the same place and that's tough. But I'm- I love it.

When I was 17, I was at La Coupole brasserie, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir asked me to join them at their table. They were fascinated that I'd watched their programme on existentialism back home and wanted to understand nothingness and being.

I do still sit back and wonder when I'm in LA if this is all really true or is it all kid-on. But it's great. I always bear in mind that the right place and time have a huge deal to do with it, and there are hugely talented actors who haven't had that break.

A lot of the point mags are going out of business. They dropped the pay tremendously and it's all because of the internet. I used to go out once a month to LA and shoot for one week. I'd make a ton of money then come back to New York and do whatever I wanted.

In LA I was watching At the Movies with Ebert and Roper, it was, nice to see them differentiate between the subject matter and the art form of making the film, and they both gave it thumbs up, and I was kind of pleased at their honesty as far as reviewers go.

My first drag role was the character Widow Simone in the ballet 'La Fille Mal Gardee.' She's a crazy social climbing woman trying to marry off her daughter to the wealthy town idiot. And in the middle of the show, she gets to perform a clog dance. I loved it.

I got to train with some of the best and have critics like Oscar de la Renta and Calvin Klein. As a student under Calvin Klein, my project was to make a coat, and then years later, I was hired at Calvin, by Calvin, to design coats for him. It came full circle!

Of course I like to be tan, but now I try to avoid it. I don't mind having a little glow, but now when I go to the beach, I put SPF 50 everywhere - either Avene or La Roche-Posay Anthelios. I have freckles, so as long as my little freckles come out, I'm happy.

It annoys me when contemporary films and television shows create artificial tensions that could easily be resolved by a quick email or the use of a search engine. 'La La Land' was guilty of this several times, as well as a more generalised aesthetic nostalgia.

I was at La Fenice opera house back in 1991 with friends, and we started talking about a conductor whom none of us liked. Somehow there was an escalation, and we started talking about how to kill him, where to kill him. This struck me as a good idea for a book.

In Paris and later in Marseille, I was surrounded by some of the best food in the world, and I had an enthusiastic audience in my husband, so it seemed only logical that I should learn how to cook 'la cuisine bourgeoise' - good, traditional French home cooking.

The only time I ever really got into rap was back in the early '90s, and bands like A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Gang Starr. Musically, they were really interesting. But when hip-hop acts start sampling Sting or Phil Collins, then I just don't get it at all.

We were shooting in a French island called La Reunion. One of my crew members gifted me free-diving equipment and took me to the waters on my day off. I spotted sharks and species of fish which can't be found elsewhere. It was a very refreshing experience for me.

Back when I was a senior in high school in Haughton, LA, I had a chance to go to LSU. Everyone I grew up with adored LSU, including my mom. But I chose to come to Mississippi State because I wanted to start a new tradition instead of perpetuating an established one.

At one time, you could sit on the Rue de la Paix in Paris or at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv or in Medina and you could see a person come in, black, white, it didn't matter. You said, 'That's an American' because there's a readiness to smile and to talk to people.

And so I remember moving to LA, going to the Islamic center in Hollywood and feeling like the cultural element wasn't what we were operating from as much as the spiritual one, and that was really cool. That was really good for, you know, my growth and my development.

If one wants to go on living, one must evolve. Before, when we composed, we would start by a series of music themes. Once created, we would hire writers and lyricists to make up the text and the story line. I was the first to do this backwards with 'Man of La Mancha.'

I have created a capsule collection for Genetic inspired by memories of growing up in LA. Denim has always been my go-to, especially during my modelling days. I discovered Genetic Denim about five years ago - they are so comfy, you could almost be wearing your pyjamas.

It's not a deliberate thing. It's not like I was rejecting the UK, which is what the papers said. It's just that when you spend a lot of time in your formative years around an accent, you're going to pick it up. I had been living in LA for a bit and that's what happened.

I'm an east coaster, you know, I'm brought up in Toronto where it's very much, like, kind of a miniature New York in that there's a subway and you're surrounded by people a lot and, you know, you bump into people and you have interactions and you communicate and la la la.

There's a design book I got years ago that had a statue of a dog with a bunch of hats on it, and I just obsessively fell in love with it. For years I searched for that dog. One day I walked into an antique shop in La Jolla and I found a white dog that I could put hats on!

I do play tennis in shorts, I have driven across the length and breadth of the country from Khardung La pass to Kanyakumari in my beloved Ambassador car, and I did compile my 100 Lyrics book, inspired by Lyrics by Sting. I don't subscribe to any definition of an Urdu poet.

I say that I do soul, R&B music. I have so many influences, from Billie Holiday, Nina Simone to Stevie Wonder and Prince and even Al Green and Bjork. And a lot of hip hop music has influenced me a lot - you know - De La Soul and Digital Underground and A Tribe Called Quest.

The Big Five is a competition played in the University of Pennsylvania's Palestra among five Philadelphia-area Division I schools: Saint Joseph's, La Salle, Penn, Temple, and Villanova. 'The Big Five' was immensely popular, and rivalries quickly grew to intense proportions.

Till 1782, I believed in the doctrine of Calvin: that is, that the majority of mankind were objects of divine condemnation and that their punishment would be everlasting. The 'Systeme de la Nature,' read about the beginning of that year, changed my opinion and made me a Deist.

Albert Camus's 'La Peste' - 'The Plague' - had an enormous impact on me when I read it in high school French class, and I chose my senior yearbook quote from it. In college, I wrote a philosophy class paper on Camus and Sartre, and again chose my yearbook quote from 'La Peste.'

LA is a harsh city to be in when you're a little girl from the South, and you have absolutely no idea what you're doing and you are thinking, 'Am I making, have I made a massive mistake? I don't have money to move back home. My parents are not on board with this. What do I do?'

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