Sonya is the way she is for a reason and I love enlightening the fans on what those things are because so many people are going through similar experiences and have amazing stories I love to hear and relate to myself.
To be honest, I'm not even thinking about America. If I was to start thinking about the enormity of 'Downton' and the size of the project, then I wouldn't be able to be very truthful to the work. I would start to watch myself too much. I'm not even thinking about it. Who knows what will happen.
I found myself in a meeting on my 13th birthday, which I really had no idea the enormity of, but I was in a meeting with the CEO of Atlantic Records, who sort of signed me right then and there as I was playing guitar for him.
I was putting myself under enormous pressure to be successful.
I woke up one day and thought, 'Enough is enough with bullying myself.' The war is within you, and that's also where it's won. You just have to tackle your insecurities and then let them go.
Like most women, I work too hard, spend too many hours hunched over a computer, and not enough time taking care of myself.
I do ask myself why I make people so enraged, because I only ever say what I think. And while I know it might not be everyone's point of view, that doesn't seem particularly intolerable to me.
I was enrolled in divinity school and thought I was going to become a minister - I'm Episcopalian - but I was disavowed of that notion pretty quickly while working at the hospital. I found myself really unfulfilled by the answers that are traditionally offered to questions of why some people suffer and why others suffer so little.
I've never considered myself a presenter or never really had the desire to do that, but in the U.S., what that entails is completely different to what it is on a panel show. A panel show is just a lot more fun.
I recall feeling an almost delicious terror when one day I found myself alone in the midst of tall June grasses that grew high as my head. But here the secret working of self consciousness is almost too entangled with the things of the past for me to explain it.
If I go into the place in myself that is love, and you go into the place in yourself that is love, we are together in love. Then you and I are truly in love, the state of being love. That's the entrance to Oneness. That's the space I entered when I met my guru.
I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.
My goal is to entertain myself and others.
I really don't think of myself as a singer. I think of myself as an entertainer, and the best place I do it is onstage.
I'm just an entertainer, man. I don't like to pigeonhole myself to anything. I love to do it all.
I truly believe that people like myself, who are in a position of entertainers in the limelight, should keep their mouth shut on politics.
Then to have Brett come along and follow in the footsteps, it's so gratifying. I get as much enjoyment out of watching Brett play as I did of entertaining people myself.
When I was producing on my own, I was doing it in order to - in a very patriarchal entertainment industry, let alone planet - very much hell-bent on trying to prove to myself, if nothing else, that I could do it as a woman.
I believe the favor of God on my life is not for me to keep to myself and become proud of, but to be used for others... I believe God has a plan for me in the entertainment world.
I didn't like England. I couldn't take the look of the place or the style of friendship. I need more intimacy from people than is considered okay there, and I felt that my personality and my enthusiasms weren't understood. I had to put a big lid on myself.
