My brother, who's a violinist now, was the real ham, the real performer of the family. His passion for the violin is the only thing that kept him from being an actor.
I knew I could never match my father as a violinist, and there were already four generations of outstanding cellists in the family.
My family is very good about visiting me, and other friends as well.
Food was always important in my family, but I didn't think of it as a vocation until a later point in life.
There's always an excitement around the Strip whenever something new being built. It was always the biggest and the best hotel or, you know, over-the-top things. And so, family would be coming in from out of town, and it was such a thrill to be showing them this, you know, erupting new volcano or whatever it was.
A lot of my father's family in Canada volunteered in the First World War because they saw it as a war that was defending the mother country.
My dad was a voracious news consumer. I remember just sitting with my family all the time. I would sit on his lap and read the paper with him. He would read it to me.
I vowed that whenever my family needed me, I would give up everything to go to them, no matter what. The show must go on was meaningless to me.
When I turned 30, due to my father's heart history and my family genetics, I vowed to start seeing a cardiologist every year and just really be proactive and take my own heart health into my own hands.
I always vowed I would never get married because no marriage in my family had worked, really. But you get to a place in your relationship where you're like, 'OK, it's time.'
I come by writing dialogue fairly naturally, I've got a chatty family; I'm a bit of a voyeur, and if I'm ever in a public place, I automatically find myself listening.
When I write, I keep the family audience in mind. I ensure there's no vulgarity, as families are coming into the theatres, and there's no blood and gore because of the kids. There is a set of people who doesn't like my cinema, but there's a bigger group that likes the kind of movies I make.
If you were there behind every family's closed doors, everyone's a little wacko. Chances are that your family is no weirder than the next family or than the other girl at school's family. Everyone can be quirky at times, and I embrace that, personally.
Waffle House is my childhood thing. We used to go there on Sundays or weekends every now and then with my family. It's just good, Southern, home-cooked food, and that's what I love.
There is nothing new about these Republican attacks on our family planning decisions. In fact, from the moment they came into power, Republicans in the House of Representatives have been waging a war on women's health.
Home, nowadays, is a place where part of the family waits till the rest of the family brings the car back.
I'm a big kid, I'm a kid at heart, so I still love the classic family films, such as the great Warner Bros film 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory' - not the remake, but the original. It's still one of the best movies, hands down, ever made, and of course that goes back to the ingenuity of the characters and the storyline.
A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground.
The reason that it's so easy to go out there and be me - warts and all, critics and everything - is because my family and my career are the only two things that really matter in the big circle of life.
My dad's a Jew, and my mom's a WASP, so that should pretty much say it all. It was a comically dysfunctional family.