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Happiness, as a word, has become sort of equated with these smiling images on television, selling some nice cream or food product or something. It's seen a bit as being a stupid consumer.

I don't like telling people where I stand on this, although I'm surprised anybody wonders. I suppose if I say I'm pro-choice, if I make that clear, it let's the audience off the hook, then they can sort of relax. Okay, it's alright he's pro-choice then I can enjoy this.

The first sort of big present I remember getting from Santa Claus was quite a small telescope that I remember going into our backyard with my parents and figuring out how to assemble, and staring at the night sky, just for hours, with both of my parents.

I do think all things in moderation. I mean, the thing to me - it actually doesn't bother me very much if people want to read chick lit. But it makes me, you know, sort of disheartened when that's all that people want to read.

Fox does the NFL a lot like they program the rest of the network. There's sort of a locker room sense of humor that prevails. With ESPN, it's more like a pat-you-on-the-back kind of comedy. I mean, they'll all get on each other a little bit, but it's never mean-spirited.

When you're writing about people that are not very well off, you seem to see the kitchen sink. So it was a bit of a sort of cosy phrase that got used a bit too much.

My siblings and I, we were raised on TV and films. Not a day went by that we weren't watching one of three movies - 'Caddyshack,' 'Animal House,' 'Beverly Hills Cop' - on rotation. Our comedy, our personalities were set watching 'Sesame Street': these really sort of wacky, Jim Henson-y characters.

Often I think bullying - especially in its adult, verbal forms - is the sort of thing you don't realize till the end of the day, and it's a horrible feeling to realize something wasn't just a bland statement, but was actually cruel. But then we're all capable of - of things that are breathtakingly cruel.

As Asian-Americans, the charge that is often lobbed against us is sort of the least original: the idea that somehow we're perpetual foreigners, that we can't be trusted, and that even my father, who was patriotic to the point that it was kind of a joke among his children, would be accused of being disloyal to America.

Then, when the Depression came, all of this changed completely. Since that time, the entire public is of a very different sort and there was not so much support for contemporary music in a direct way.

But thankfully, my first album, 'Wide Screen,' was sort of a critics' darling - everyone raved about it, but no one bought it. They only manufactured 10,000 copies; I wasn't even in the running for failure!

When I think of Sherlock Holmes, I think of a guy who can wander into the confusion of life and sort of pluck out answers at will.

I think the phrase that resonates from 'Just One Year' is something I sort of live by: 'The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.'

I think probably the qualities that I look for in a man are somewhat different than they were before I became a public person, but not that much different. I think that, sort of, the element of trust is certainly much bigger for me, but the other things that - the other qualities, intelligence and kindness and sense of humor, those things.

When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.

I think it's important to find the joy in your work and the things that sort of renew that.

I only take causes or write about things that I am passionate about, and I do it with a certain flair and a sort of wink and a nod.

You set up a story and it turns inside out and that is, for me, the most exciting sort of story to write. The viewer thinks it's going to be about something and it does the opposite.

Relatively many autists are first-born children. There is also a pretty widespread conviction that the parents of autists are somehow different - for instance, many of them are very serious people or people who are themselves under some sort of strain.

Parenthood and having kids puts you in touch with a whole other sort of sensitivity which is nothing but good. You feel more than you ever felt. You feel that vulnerability, but at the same time you wouldn't trade it for anything.

Books fall from Garry Wills like leaves from a maple tree in a sort of permanent October.

I guess I've sort of always wanted to be an actress, except when I was five, which, I did want to be the Queen of England.

I'm sort of a Freudian about theater; it's always a struggle between freedom and security, between 'Do I stay where I am with my family because I love them or do I follow the thing that makes my heart feel the greatest?'

I understood right from the start that every set of library doors were the sort of magic portals that lead to other lands. My God, right within reach there were dinosaurs and planets and presidents and girl detectives!

To me, everything outside of Los Angeles is the 'south,' including places like San Diego. It's sort of like the saying, 'Everything is God.' Indeed it is.

People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of 'Hitchhiker's,' and I thought, 'No, no.' I didn't want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I'd already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

I always think family get-togethers when everybody just sort of crashes out are pretty much the best. If it's more than a few days it gets hard, but for just a few days, it's the most amazing thing ever.

I love the Capitol rotunda. It's just so big and so grand, and I love being in the Capitol at night when it's empty, and you can go stand in the Capitol rotunda and bask in the silence of history. You can sort of imagine all of the things that have happened inside that Rotunda from presidents lying in state to other important events.

These were all middle-class kids from literary backgrounds, joining this sort of train going by, this pop train, jumping on. Whereas the rest of the rock scene, you'll find that there's mostly working-class people.

I would love to have some sort of 'Back To The Future' Delorean time machine travel device so I could go back to 1981 to see that very first Jackson 5 concert I went to, back when I was a kid.

Bombino's a super modest guy, very nice. His whole crew is a bunch of characters and he's definitely the Grand Poobah. I don't think the other guys are that much younger than him, but he definitely feels like the wise man; you just sort of get that sense when you're around him. He doesn't say that much but he's humble and well-respected.

I went through quite a few establishments that maybe weren't great for myself - security units, youth-offender places. I guess that was going to the lions' den. Social services said, 'You've got to go to some sort of school.'

I got nominated for a Tony in my Broadway debut, which was fascinating and thrilling and sort of unbelievable all at the same time.

I've always been into dressing nicely. My dad's really into fashion, also. We'll always go out and buy stuff. He has his own style and I have my own style, but it's a shared thing. Same thing with my grandfather; he was really into his style, so it's just sort of been passed down, I think.

To be really in shape, it's dynamic. It's got to be a lot of different everything, always switching it up. So a good day for me would be hit the gym, do some sort of cross training in the gym and then go surfing and then maybe take a jiu-jitsu class at night or go swimming at night or go stand up paddle boarding in the evening.

We live in a twilight sort of world where, unfortunately, the perception of the seriousness of abortion - has grown progressively obscured in the minds of many of our contemporaries.

Each one of us had a little story to tell and each recording was based on that. Lou played all of the music but we both sort of kicked around some cords during the writing phase.

I'm a very consistent leader, and people won't find me different day to day. You won't have to have the sort of conversation that says, 'How is she today? Is this a good day to have this conversation?' You won't find that situation with me. I treat people with respect.

You know, I think I did originally have some sort of idea of maybe a Where Eagles Dare kind of mission against impossible odds, but it really sort of died before I had a chance to really go anywhere with it, and then just doing the book was out of the question.

I used to have sort of mixed feelings about a producer whose only skills seemed to be going into the studio, schmoozing the artists and making them feel good. I can see now that in some cases, that's what you have to do because that's the only way you're going to get them to produce.

I came from the musical stage. My first show was '110 In The Shade.' I started as a ballet dancer and then sort of gravitated toward musical theater, so any time I got asked to sing or dance, it was a joy for me.

The last Christmas movie I really liked was 'It's a Wonderful Life,' probably. It's sort of a schmaltzy movie, but it's not without its dark moments. It still gets to me every year.

I guess as you get older you sort of see the mechanics, even with the best comedians. There's admiration for people I admire, but it's not guttural laughter. It's a wry 'Oh, well done, sir.' But I sort of miss that slightly; I miss the raw joy of comedy I used to get.

I can't say that the ending of a story is always the best part of the story, and yet there's sort of this implicit idea that the finale is somehow supposed to be the mind-blowing best episode of a show. The question is: Why is that? Why do people make that assumption?

The virtual choir would never replace live music or a real choir, but the same sort of focus and intent and esprit de corps is evident in both, and at the end of the day it seems to me a genuine artistic expression.

When you're part of history, you don't know it. You're just sort of living your life.

With 'Letters from Iwo Jima,' then 'Memories of Tomorrow,' I reached a sort of turning point in my acting. I had poured so much of myself into those movies that I really had no idea where to go from there.

But, I think that the reason I responded to this book, sort of paradoxically, is that it starts out like The Big Chill, sort of. Four friends, who are not quite happy with their life, and every year they get together for a week and look for some comfort from each other.

There's a tacit belief that actors shouldn't write books, they're sort of allowed to direct movies but there will be a lot of skepticism, and they shouldn't do artwork or music. There are these invisible roadblocks to gain entree to these areas for actors, and you kind of have to crash through those invisible barriers.

The books I love most are the ones that combine some sort of gripping story with really beautiful or stylish writing. Some of my favorites are 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides, 'The Interpreter of Maladies' by Jhumpa Lahiri, and 'Blindness' by Jose Saramago.

And certainly don't get caught by the press having too much to drink, you now, that sort of thing.

I try to wear a watch all the time, because I think guys get the short end of the stick when it comes to jewelry and accessories. A watch is a very chic men's item, and you're sort of wasting it if you just look at your cell phone.

Outside of 'Justified,' I do like to keep it to comedy. When I'm not there, I try to seek out stuff that sort of more along the lighter fare. I have more fun on those sets than I do on drama sets just because when it's heavy, it's heavy, and it's hard to get away from it.

I don't read reviews until after I'm done with a production, but when I do finally get to them, I'm always sort of floored by what the bad ones say.

Arlen Specter left the GOP because it is a lot easier to win in Pennsylvania as a Democrat than as a Republican. It is that simple. For folks on the Right to brush this off as some sort of 'good purge' is extremely naive.

It's an honor to have people follow you and watch you. I do get a lot of fan mail and I read everything. It's very flattering and sort of surreal. I'm very glad that people like what I do and they want to follow what's going on.

I don't believe in kicking away ladders. By that, I mean the ladders by which I ascended as a young writer, small magazines that didn't pay anything, and that sort of thing.

The closest I get to any sort of 'designer' items would probably be my weakness for jeans - they don't have to be any particular brand, but I'm willing to do almost anything, go anywhere, spend obscene amounts of money for that elusive 'perfect pair.'

I've been recording audiobooks for more than 30 years. I've recorded over 500 titles on all sort of things. I'm a sort of genre-free recording artist - classics and romances, I just finished a sci-fi book, self help... just all kinds of things.

I don't view myself as a practitioner of a particular skill or method. I'm constantly looking at what's the most interesting problem that I could possibly work on. I really try to figure out what sort of scientist I need to be in order to solve the problem I'm interested in solving.

I teach a lot of graduate creative writing classes, and on the first day, I like to go around the room and ask everybody what's the last book you've read that you really loved. And all of the women tend to give me chick lit titles. And to me, that's sort of disappointing because it's their only exposure to fiction somehow.

There are recurring elements in popularized fairy tales, such as absent parents, some sort of struggle, a transformation, and a marriage. If you look at a range of stories, you find many stories about marriage, sexual initiation, abandonment. The plots often revolve around what to me seem to be elemental fears and desires.

Richard III is not likeable. Macbeth is not likeable. Hamlet is not likeable. And yet you can't take your eyes off them. I'm far more interested in that than I am in any sort of likeability.

It takes me a long time to write, and I trust myself, so I write very sparsely, so when I do, I know it's good, you know what I mean? Rather than writing a whole bunch and having to sort out what's good and what's not.

I'm doing a pilot for Comedy Central with the band Steel Panther. They're faux heavy metal. They started as kind of a tribute band out here, or a cover band, and they're funny guys, and they just sort of morphed into their own thing.

I was happy she got it and I have to sort of - and one of the reasons I did Third Watch is because I wanted to break that thing of just being the pretty girl and play it down and let it be about the work.

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.

Patrick Swayze reminded me a lot of Gene Kelly. Patrick had that Everyman quality. Gene made dancing sort of an accessible idea for the regular guy out there.

There came a time when these two incompatible notions of who I was, well, something had to give. Either that 'something' is where you acquiesce to the world around you and you conform, or you sort of defiantly break whatever remaining bonds connect you to that world and create for yourself a different set of values.

I think they do have to get it right in Sierra Leone. There has to be something in there now to establish confidence, to stabilize the situation, and then to move to some sort of political negotiations.

So on my screenplay, on the left-hand side of the page, I will put all the ideas that refer to the scene next to it so I have some sort of pictorial reference.

There's an awful lot of corruption in Japanese business and politics, corruption of the sort that can make for great setting for a spy story.

You've got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume - they need to know who the character is, what they're like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.

I've been in a band, so I understand the politics. Sometimes the bass player doesn't like what the guitar player is doing, and you have to sort of even that out.

I didn't expect to feel pathos for the villains in our show. I feel quite moved in several of our episodes; I never realized that a show like 'Motive,' which aims for a broad appeal, could have that sort of emotional impact.

I tend to sort of dive into things without worrying about risk or anything. Like, when I get an idea, I tend to just go for it and see what happens.

I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. It reminds me of when we were just starting out because we would open for other bands in the beginning.

I began illustrating children's books because of a growing disillusionment with the sort of work I was doing in the advertising industry. Book publishing offered me the chance to be far more creative.

Both my parents were agnostic. My mother was kind of a Buddhist. She had some spiritual tendencies, but they were kind of flaky - New Agey, you know? Which is partly why I'm suspicious of that sort of thing. I'm skeptical of any spiritual practice that doesn't involve other people and doesn't involve some sort of consistent tradition.

I go to this gym in Hollywood: it's a Cross Fit gym. It's basically just a really high intensity, sort of, athletic movements. I'm sure Cross Fit is going to be mad at me for not giving their definition of what Cross Fit is.

Some felt as if 'Charlie Hebdo' was obsessed with its 'Screw Allah' stance. It's a sort of provocation that caused a lot of debates.

I actually went on a vegan diet. So I was nagging myself there. I don't nag other people about it. It was sort of an interesting experiment, and I found it wasn't that hard at all.

I think part of what acting did for me is it kind of represents all my greatest fears. I'm sort of compelled to do it, but at the same time, it's so frightening. But I think that the things that frighten me the most in life are the things I should be doing.

The way they had the room that I was in set up, there was some sort of sound deadening platform that I had to stand on in order to get close enough to the microphone.

If you come to my house, you won't see a wall of trophies or things like that. I'm sort of 'on to the next thing' all the time.

Let me be absolutely clear: I think it is defeatist to sort of say we want to leave the European Union. We're going to try and change the rules and change the way it works and change the objectives that it has in order to make it something that works for Britain.

After a while, the character sort of took over.

It's always interesting to be playing against some of my best friends and some of my longtime teammates. You get to see them before the game and after the game and it's always nice to catch up but when the whistle blows it's sort of all business on the field.

I'm by no means a pianist. I think that's safe to say, but the piano, for me, I would say it's the enabler. It gave me what I needed and gives me what I need in order to write a song. And I think playing or improvising on the piano is where I feel most liberated and sort of less conscious of all my insecurities or inadequacies.

I actually worked for a small company in Ohio that sort of farmed out work from Disney and Dreamworks, so I really only ever worked in two studios.

I don't have some sort of moral dilemma with coming as a guest to an event or a fashion show.

I think generalizations of any sort are dangerous. I'll say, if that is the case - right now it's an American issue.

The moon is essentially gray, no color; looks like plaster of Paris or sort of a grayish beach sand.

I'm a germ-phobe when I meet a lot of people or shake a lot of hands. I always have hand sanitizer and alcohol swabs so I can sort of go back and forth between the two.

I was always drawn to performing. I took improv and acting classes during the summers and was involved in middle and high school plays. But when I discovered indie and punk music in high school, those things sort of took over.

I said I thought female labour of the sort exacted from these slaves, and corporal chastisement such as they endure, must be abhorrent to any manly or humane man.

In Haiti, it - people seemed - in my experience in Haiti, people are so open to photographs and journalism. And there doesn't seem to be the same sort of restrictions or wariness about the press that you would experience in Washington, for instance, on many levels.

Soap operas are like boot camps for film actors, so I really learned a lot. It was a masterclass in working for camera. I made myself watch myself every day. I would sort of try and be objective about it and critique myself a little. There's a lot more skill set than people realize in soap operas. They shoot, like, 35 scenes a day.

I sort of was inspired by 'Friday Night Lights,' where it was a very different show, but similar in that they were both large ensemble dramas where you had many stories going on at once. I wanted to do a show that shared that element, and that's really why I wanted to develop 'Parenthood' as a series.

Well, the right-wing policy with regard to Israel - the people who don't want to deal with Arafat, who don't want a Palestinian state - the whole sort of right-wing view is consistent with the view toward Iraq. It's the same policy and the same people.