I wasn't the typical pageant girl - I was a little more nerdy, and they gave me a voice. I created the Queen of the Universe pageant, which is charity-based, to benefit UNESCO. For me, the most important thing is that contestants have a charity-based platform or charity ambition.
Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11 - confusion even. And I think that's hard to capture in journalism.
Gollum was so interesting to me because he's morally ambivalent, and I love the notion of a quest that is to lose something. Not to gain, but to get rid of something.
As an actor, I'm ambivalent because I'm focused on the other person and what they're giving me, what I need to be giving them, and what the character is thinking.
When the hospital sends for me, when the ambulance comes and I ease my way out of the world, I'd rather be in Detroit, Michigan, than Lenox Hill.
The difference between me and them is that I'll look at Jesse Jackson and I'll see four Jesse Jacksons, and they'll just see one, the clown ambulance chaser.
I don't think my wife likes me very much, when I had a heart attack she wrote for an ambulance.
I know as I'm taking my dying breath, the ambulance guy will ask me why they cancelled Action.
I had many friends to help me to fall; but as to rising again, I was so much left to myself, that I wonder now I was not always on the ground. I praise God for His mercy; for it was He only Who stretched out His hand to me. May He be blessed for ever! Amen.
I can do an hour-long speech about Democrats taking African Americans for granted, and I'd have a line behind me of very prominent African-Americans who would say, 'Amen.'
It was a big thing for me to read black writers. 'Fences,' by August Wilson. James Baldwin's 'Amen Corner.' 'The Fire Next Time.' 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X,' of course.
I'm just about social justice. Amen to women like me!
I actually got thrown into my Bar Mitzvah because my teacher, my Cantor, did not tell me that they would all say 'amen' at the end of each, for want of a better word, paragraph. And that threw me completely. I almost went into an Ella Fitzgerald sort of scat.
Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy.
Forget not, O Lord, that I am one of those whom Thou hast created, and with Thine own blood hast redeemed. I repent me of my sins: I will strive to amend my ways.
I own guns because it's my right, it's my Second Amendment right, and no one in Washington gave me that right; it's a natural right confirmed by the very people that founded this nation.
Can you tell me what's more unconstitutional than taking away from the people of America their Fifth Amendment rights, their Fourteenth Amendment rights, and the right to equal protection under the law?
At the time - but we've since made amends - James Franco and I really didn't get along. When we were on 'Freaks and Geeks,' we were 19, and we really, really disliked each other. He shoved me to the ground once; it was really brutal. We're friends now, and we really like each other now as adults - but as kids, we did not get along.
The next time you hear me attacked as a socialist - like tomorrow - remember this: I don't believe that government should take over the grocery store down the street or control the means of production. But I believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.
Nobody's going to tell me to rap in an American accent.
