I was so shy, it almost paralyzed me in social settings. And as shy people know, that can become a vicious cycle: The more uncomfortable you feel around people, the more you retreat, and the more shy you get.
The only thing I can do is act, but it's not something I even feel comfortable doing. It costs me a lot, because I'm a shy person, even if I don't look it.
I'm just a really shy person. I don't gravitate towards attention, so for someone like me to have as much attention as I have is bizarre.
I am a shy person, basically. I don't think I can take my shirt off in front of so many people. I never thought about it. No one asked me to. But I don't even know if people like it if they see me without a shirt all of a sudden. But let's see, if a film demands it, I might just do it.
There was a combination of shyness and just fear of looking stupid that kept me out of a lot of interesting creative conversations that I could have had at an early age.
It is strange: I love to be in front of the audience, but I have this opposite side that is afraid of meeting people, that doesn't want to talk. I feel it's like having a little hard stone inside me of problems, doubts, and shyness.
I'm pretty Sicilian if I've been crossed. I don't seek revenge, but I never forget. And I make it hard to repair, which is not a great quality because if people held me to that standard, no one would be around me - ever.
Student journeys which were important to me were Sicily, Greece, and Egypt, where I really saw these buildings, and that is where you're able to grasp what things mean.
My father took my mother, me, and my brother from Sicily to New York. He got us one-way tickets but booked himself a return flight. He dumped us with my mother's parents, who had just arrived from Italy, and abandoned us. That was 1986. I didn't see or speak to him for another 12 years. That's cruel.
It's been a long comeback. Things were pretty dark for me. But I have a faith now, and it saves my day. I was angry with God for a long time because I was unhappy with me. I hadn't learned to make the distinction between God and my parents. But there's a peace now. In the end, I got sick and tired of being sick and tired.
One of the things that made me persist in the Antarctic in the face of sickening discouragements was my determination to name a portion of the earth's surface after my father.
I was a very sickly kid. While I was in the hospital at age 7, my Dad brought me a stack of comic books to keep me occupied. I was hooked.
The sidekick business has been good to me.
I remember my agent at ICM at the beginning of my career telling me that I wasn't pretty enough, that I was always going to be a quirky sidekick. And he was an ogre of a man. He should have been carrying a torch. If he was in a bar, he couldn't have come near me, and then he was deciding my fate.
There is nothing harder for me than to sit at the sideline, not being able to be productive.
It's easy to sit in the press box and say, βHey, they should run the ball.' Come down and stand on the sideline with me and make decisions. You should run it here, you should pass it here, let's throw a screen here, let's get the quarterback out of the pocket right here.
We all started snowboarding in the beginning as a family just to be closer together, go on trips. It was our soccer, but instead of Dad yelling at me from the sideline he is there riding with me and hitting the jumps even before I am hitting them.
Fashion was more of a sideline for me. I did it for the money.
I don't feel as if anything that has happened to me in my life was sidetracked because I was a woman.
I had a real good thing going for me, and I got sidetracked. It doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be drugs. It doesn't have to be alcohol. That part of my life is over.
