Once in a while, I treat myself to a cheesecake or carrot cake.
I don't think of myself as a comedian, but as an artist, a scientist and chemist who just happens to be funny. I started doing stand-up to add another level to my game. I feel that I'm a young rookie with a veteran's skill.
Before I started chemotherapy treatments, I wrote down the best advice from doctors, family, friends, books, and survivors and created an 'Owner's Manual' to help me take care of myself. It would remind me that cancer is doable.
I've had enough of giving millionaires like Dick Cheney and myself tax breaks and giving America's kids a mountain of debt.
For me to call myself a musician, it's necessary to play live, and it rewards so much - not just in the pay cheque sense but what it does for my playing. I feel it through a tour - I feel it at the end of a tour - all that I've gathered, and especially now that I am improvising so much.
Rather than writing about my experiences with other people, 'Ugly Cherries' is the first song I've ever written about myself. It's a confrontation: an attempt to unpack my own queerness with humor and self care.
I don't really believe in diets. I love food... If I deprive myself, I'm going to want it more. I snack on yogurt, raw cashews and cherry tomatoes.
I consider myself to be a genius who happens to play chess.
I felt that chess... is a science in the form of a game... I consider myself a scientist. I wanted to be treated like a scientist.
I don't take breaks, man. In the past, I used to spend my free time getting in trouble, and now I spend it working on my music. If I'm not playing drums with my cover band, Chevy Metal, I'm working on songs for myself.
I must always, always have a box of Extra chewing gum in my bag because I have developed a terrible cheek-chewing compulsion. It's not only uncomfortable, but I look really weird when I'm doing it, and chewing gum is the only way I can stop myself.
Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad.
The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.
I wouldn't even call myself a former child star. I was a child actor; there's a difference.
If I can make a career for myself after Potter, and it goes well, and is varied and with longevity, then that puts to bed the 'child actors argument'.
I could have gone the route of a lot of these former child actors, but I didn't want that for myself. Like I said, when I was 14 years old, I decided to quit. I didn't ever want to do it again.
I wasn't scared of childbirth. I educated myself and did my fair share of research, and that made me feel a little more prepared.
Stepping back into theatre, a childhood dream, I always felt like I would be onstage. I hadn't imagined myself in a composer role... I find it so satisfying to be behind the scenes and writing the music and watching it elevated and characterized by different voices than my own. It's so exciting.
One of the reasons I get so much joy out of my own children's childhoods is that I'm having my first childhood myself.
I usually feel like the role comes to you to sort of illuminate some piece of where you are in your life. I feel like I myself am a single woman and I'm childless - by choice - at this point, and I don't know what will happen.
