I played a lot of sarcastic, wisecracking characters for a long time, and people would think that was me. And it's very much not me, and then people would think I was being sarcastic when I wasn't: 'Oh, you're making fun of me right now.' And I wasn't!

I think that I've just kind of found my niche, if that makes sense. I still write the same, but I feel like I've found what separates me, and I always try to stay in that when I write. It took me a long time to discover that, so I try to be protective.

My grandmother taught me how to read, very early, but she taught me to read just the way she taught herself how to read - she read words rather than syllables. And as a result of that, when I entered school, it took me a long time to learn how to write.

I've really loved steampunk for a long time, ever since 'Wild Wild West,' and it's always been a genre and an era that's fascinated me. But so often it's set in England, and that doesn't really resonate with me, or maybe it just seems a little overdone.

I'm aware that most people who meet me for the first time think of me in a certain way because of who my father is. That just comes with the territory. But that's been that way ever since I was a little kid as long as I can remember. I grew up that way.

I sang all the time, and finally, my mother looked at me and said: 'I have a friend in New York who gives singing lessons. If she says you can sing, you can take lessons. If you can't sing, I never want you to open your mouth again as long as you live.'

You don't want to keep giving yourself a sugar spike and then crash and get exhausted and need coffee because you shoot for a long time. On set, I eat a lot of peanut butter and apples, things that have actual energy and protein in them to keep me going.

For a long time, I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was desperate to find something that fit me and I just decided that if I could organically make a professional living out of the things that interested me, then I would be a happy person.

I'm drawn as well to the lower echelons of things because it struck me a long time ago that it didn't really matter on what level people were working on anything; it was just as important to them as the people working on what's perceived as a higher level.

Sometimes I don't even pull my shoes off for six weeks at a time, except, you know, just to take a shower. I just take breaks between 24 hours a day, just a break now and then, it don't take me long to rest; maybe 20 to30 minutes sometime, or maybe an hour.

It used to take me a really long time, and I used to not be able to write in the studio because I felt there was a lot of pressure to be perfect. The more I'm collaborating with other artists, the more I realize being in the studio is about catching a vibe.

Being the U.S. champion is a big deal for me. Knowing that my ancestors built this country, it's kind of like, the Irish were treated badly in this country for a long time, with a lot of tacky Irish stereotypes, so to me, it's kind of like a bragging right.

Some friends of mine bothered me for a long time about getting on the social networking pages. They were close friends that I liked to mess with, and I think that I kind of enjoyed for a while that it bothered them so much. Now they've just kind of given up.

A friend of mine passed away unexpectedly at the very end of making 'Ghosts', someone who had been as close to me as someone could get, someone who was far too young. But I couldn't really sing about it for a long time - not in the way I would have wanted to.

We always spend more time on the throwing events and a little bit more on the long jump. They're my weaker events - they don't come as naturally to me as running and jumping. I like the hurdles and the high-jump, I'm a springy, speedy athlete so those suit me.

I've had people - I've seen people do routines that I knew they didn't take from me but they had - because for whatever reason I had stopped doing it a long time ago. There's no way they would have heard this bit. But it ends up being pretty much the same thing.

It took me a long time to figure out that I didn't have to do everything, that it was actually a lot more helpful if I did a couple things really, really well than a whole bunch of things really badly, or nothing at all, because the whole thing was overwhelming.

I don't have them down here asking me what my urban agenda is. I don't find them really doing in-depth stories on community-based organizations that have been struggling for a long time and who are out trying to get funds. They aren't interested in those stories.

As single-mom female inventor, there was no path for that, so really I don't think people took me seriously for a really long time. Certainly the Miracle Mop being my first successful product, people started to pay attention, and I guess now they really pay attention.

I remember one time when all the nuns in my Catholic grade school got around in a semicircle, me and Mom in the middle, and they said, 'Mrs. Farley, the children at school are laughing at Christopher, not with him.' I thought, 'Who cares? As long as they're laughing.'

Don't get me wrong: politicians have been lying for a long time, long before Donald Trump was born, but the degree of just nonstop rage, grievance, prevarication, I haven't seen, probably because we haven't had a direct line from a politician's id to the public before.

My husband passed away a long time ago, and of course a lot of people have courted me. I've been taken to dinner and also to things like Larry Hagman, in particular years ago. And more recently, of course, little Hugh Jackman - and he's too young for me though, frankly.

I've been through a lot and played for a long time, so I can understand what others will go through. That's why I want to help them out. There are a lot of players who go to Belgium, for example, and have had terrible experiences. I know players, and they have come to me.

I wish there were two of me and 48-hour days so I could get everything done. But for me, I have to not try and think that everything has to be 100% perfect all the time and leave room for error. As long as my kids feel loved and a priority, everything really is secondary.

This image of wanting to be an artist - that I would in some way become an artist -was very strong. I knew for a long, long time that that's what I would be. But nothing I ever did seemed to bring me any nearer to the condition of being an artist. And I didn't know how to do it.

We have struggled with terrorism for a long time. In the Reagan administration, I was a hawk on the subject. I said terrorism is a big problem, a different problem, and we have to take forceful action against it. Fortunately, Ronald Reagan agreed with me, but not many others did.

Not long ago, every time I did a picture shoot for a magazine, the photographer would ask me to show up wearing jeans and cowboy boots. They seemed to think I was a hillbilly. Now it's different. Now they're not quite sure what to make of me. And I show up wearing whatever I want.

I was 24 when I was embroiled in a high-profile lawsuit. This was 2014, long before, en masse and on social media, we said #MeToo and #TimesUp. At the time, I felt completely alone. Visceral, hateful online harassment from strangers left me paranoid and anxious for years afterward.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother's illness. She had Parkinson's disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time... All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn't want to get trapped.

I was Lady Gaga way before her time. I had a wee kettle for a handbag. Didn't everyone, at some point? One of the teachers used to call me Dame Flora Robson because I had this big, long Victorian skirt. And I wore a Peruvian hat. It was the 1980s - people were wearing lots of lace.

There was a lot of improvisation on 'Step Brothers.' I remember it being really frightening, and it took me a long time to get used to it and grow to be able to hold my own. But I remember when it was done feeling like, 'I don't know if I ever want to go back to working another way.'

I try to live with honor, even if it costs me millions of dollars and takes a long time. It's very unusual in Hollywood. Few people are trustworthy - a handshake means nothing to them. They feel they're required to keep an agreement with you only if you're successful or they need you.

Some of the most green people in our lives are our parents and grandparents, who always bought locally and carefully. I remember my grandmother would buy a jar of cream and make it last for a long time. To me, that is just as green as something with an expensive, eco-savvy label on it.

I know Noah Baumbach from a long time ago. We were hanging out one night, and he asked if I wanted to be in his movie. If somebody whose stuff you really like says, 'Hey, you want to do it with me?,' you got to do it. I would like to say that I get these offers all the time, but I don't.

Long hair, for me, is actually less maintenance. I went through a phase when I was kid where I wanted a pixie cut. At the time I thought it looked awesome, but I look back and I looked like such a dork! When I have short hair, I feel like I have to blow dry it, or it doesn't sit properly.

I became an electrician after high school. But I always had this thing in me to write. But it was always a little shameful. To say you were a poet was saying you were kind of crazy, and I carried that around for a long time. I still kind of carry that. And I think it might be true, actually.

I thought a director was like a pillow who sat under the writer, supporting them and submitting to their vision. It took me a long time to realise that what a writer really wants is a production that matches the play and the writing. It is the only way the play can achieve its full potential.

I don't think I knew that you could be a novelist. I think a lot of my students are in the same condition. I thought it was unreachable, that it was sort of dead people. It took me a long time - I think I was well into novel writing before I really thought, 'Actually, this is a valid pastime.'

I'd already been using the Uber Eats app for a long time - and it's super simple to use. That's just what I look for when I go into partnerships. If something comes to me that I've never used before for a potential partnership, then it doesn't feel real or natural. This one is a match made in heaven.

When I was a child I used to read books by Gerald Durrell, who founded Jersey Zoo. He had a job collecting animals for zoos and for a long time that is what I wanted to do. Later when I was a teenager I had a fantastic English teacher called Mrs. Stafford. Her enthusiasm made me decide to be a writer.

I had tried writing novels for many years, and they always escaped me. For a long time, I thought, 'It's just not in me to write a novel. It's not something I'm able to do.' It seemed like everything I wrote naturally ended at the bottom of page three. A picture book, three pages; an essay, three pages.

Once I got to college, it seemed that the Hamptons were a little bit too posh for me and didn't represent the kind of values I was embracing in my late teens. So, I didn't go out there, except to visit my parents, for a long time. And then, after 9/11, I discovered it was a nice, mellow place to hang out.

Personally, it all feels like I've been filming just one long film the whole time and I have no personal like or dislike for any of the films that I've done. I feel like all of the all of them are important to me, all of the cast and all the staff that I've worked with have also been very important to me.

After I wrote my memoir, 'A Long Way Gone,' I was a bit exhausted. I didn't want to write another memoir; I felt that it might not be sane for one to speak about himself for many, many, many years in a row. At the same time, I felt the story of 'Radiance of Tomorrow' pulling at me because of the first book.

I wasn't the most confident of cooks, but I just persevered, and I wanted to learn, and I wanted to be a sponge, and I wanted to be better than the next person, and I wanted to learn as much as I could, so I just kept pushing, and it took me a long time actually to be confident in my technique and my ability as a cook.

I didn't know until high school that I was interested in writing in any real way. But there was this boy that I had a crush on, and I used to tell him all the time what I felt about him. Finally he gave me a blank journal and said to write it all down - and it didn't take me very long to realize how much I loved writing.

Cam disappears at the end of 'Rapture.' It was the only way for me to say good-bye to him at the time, and it's the way he prefers to split, anyway. I always knew I would return to him. He's been my favorite from the start. Readers have long asked what happened to him, but I had to wait for his story to come to me on its own.

It's taken me a long, long time to figure out how to deal with negativity, because it used to really upset me. I was always that girl that, if I was performing in the club and there was one person not paying attention or not liking me, the whole club could be packed with people loving me, but I'd be obsessed with that one person.

When I go in and talk to students about being a Member of Parliament, I say to them it took me 21 years from joining the Conservative Party as a 16-year-old to being elected as a Member of Parliament for the first time in Loughborough. It's a long journey, but the rewards when you get there, the feeling of accomplishment is huge.

Yeah, I mean, I did regular stand-up for a long time. And I did - I stopped doing stand-up when I worked on 'Ellen,' which was for five years. So when I went back to it, I found that, like, regular stand-up didn't really do it for me anymore. It almost felt insincere, like I wasn't saying anything I actually really wanted to say.

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