I like to think of the world's greatest athlete coming up to bat against me - Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky, I don't care who it is - and I'm looking at him thinking, you have no chance.
I was in Toronto with my parents, and my dad took me to an outdoor hockey rink. I was 3 or 4, and I just remember everything about that day. For some reason, I thought, 'This is it. This is what I'm supposed to do.' And this is around the time that Gretzky came to L.A., so I immediately joined a hockey league.
My dad started taking me to Winnipeg games when I was 3 or 4. As a kid, I loved Wayne Gretzky, and I remember the first game I got to see him play against the Jets. The Kings beat the Jets, and I was happy that they did. Gretzky left the game after the first period, and I was upset about that.
Shonda Rhimes, especially, saw something in me that no one had and then wrote to my strengths for 'Grey's Anatomy.' That's the job I think really opened up a whole new world for me.
That's why the role that I have on 'Grey's Anatomy' is important to me, because it's a human being. He doesn't have to wear race on his sleeve; he doesn't even have to talk about it. We just lead by our actions.
Let me say this as clearly as I can: No matter how sharp a grievance or how deep a hurt, there is no justification for killing innocents.
To me, race is not all about grievance. It is also about pride and empathy and humanity and understanding the value of difference. But along with that, there are also expectations that we should set for ourselves and for others. We should expect to be treated as equal citizens.
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.
There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.
I'm bound to fail when I write in Italian, but unlike my sense of failure in the past, this doesn't torment or grieve me.
If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now 'grieving' for 'Calvin and Hobbes' would be wishing me dead.
America had taken my father from me. And over most of the years of his illness, I gradually started feeling this support system from this country who-people grieving along with us.
It's important to remember that the animals are not grieving with us. They're very accepting. They're not lying there thinking 'How could you do this to me? Why aren't you keeping me going?' Pets don't do the human things of guilt and anger and recrimination that we do. They come and go with great acceptance.
Patty Griffin is iconic, and there's no other word to really describe her. She is iconic for a lot of people - not only for me but for a lot of fans. Her voice is one of a kind, and she's such an important figure in the American music scene.
My wife gets so mad at me because I don't like to cook on the grill.
Grilling used to make me nervous, but then I learned to view the fire as just another source of heat, no different from a stove or an oven.
My friend... used to tease me about a tattoo I had right here, but it was so big, and what he was teasing me about - he said it looked like a flying monkey. It's supposed to have been a grim reaper holding a ball. But it did look like a monkey.
Sometimes it seemed to me I could not look at those silent little figures; that I must go north, to the grim coal fields, to the Rocky Mountain camps, where the labor fight is at least fought by grown men.
I seem to be known as much by the moniker 'Mrs Funnybones' as my own name these days. The book was about how a modern woman looks at India and how India looks right back at her. I am glad that India seems to be looking back at me with a grin.
'Hollywood maids' are so idiotic. They grin at everything. I told Norman Lear I didn't want to play a maid because of that 'hee-hee/grin-grin' attitude, and he said, 'Who said I wanted that?' He told me he wanted two strong women that are the black and white of the same coin. I said, 'Oh, well - in that case, I'll be right there!'
