No one knows for sure if you can inherit a stammer, and so I worry that my baby might. It's why I want to work on my speech before he arrives. I don't want him to hear me stammer.
Stan Hansen was a tough-as-nails freshman middle linebacker when I was a senior at West Texas State. He was a damn good football player, but he developed some problems with his knees. When football didn't work out he asked me about professional wrestling.
I took a political stance early on, but I don't think my work is overtly political. I respond to events.
When you're a stand-up comic, you live and die by what you say on stage. There's no director or writer or producer who can tell you what to say and not to say. Once in a while, a club owner will ask a comic to work clean, or not say something, but that's few and far between.
I don't imagine myself, my work, or my life, fitting into any kind of standardized path. In fact, the idea of there even being a standard freaks me out a lot.
Certainly, writing a book was challenging. It took me a long time to learn how to do it. It took me seven years to get a sense of how to wean myself off the process and trickery of songwriting. You realize that giant metaphors work in songs because you have so few words. Standing alone on a page, they threaten to be overblown in a hurry.
You've got to be vulnerable when you're talking to kids. There's nothing worse than some adult standing up there just talking down to some kid. You can't work that way.
I like finding stuff that I suck at and trying to get better. So I'm taking classes, getting myself comfortable in an acting scene. You've got to work out those ticks. For instance, standing up used to be really hard for me. I act much better if I'm sitting down.
Then, with lots of people doing that without ever looking over their shoulders to see how they were affecting anybody else, it couldn't work, and it didn't work, and it just came to a standstill.
I really never had any ambitions to be a standup comic. I was talked into it by guys that I used to work out with.
It would be incredible to work with Stanley Kubrick and go back in time.
Stanley Kubrick knew we had good graphics around MIT and came to my lab to find out how to do it. We had some really good stuff. I was very impressed with Kubrick; he knew all the graphics work I had ever heard of, and probably more.
I want women to see, especially us big women, that you don't have to let them cut you and suck it out. You don't have to let them staple you up. You don't have to let them give you a pill. You don't have to let them put a band around your organs. If you just put the work in, baby, I promise you, it comes off.
I would jump at the chance to work with the inordinately-talented J.J. Abrams on a new 'Star Trek' film.
I'm not interested in doing 'Star Wars.' It's an amazing movie, but that's not my gift. I tell the stories that I tell that relate to the people who love what I do. That is the place and the path that I know I am supposed to be on. The minute I try and go do something else, it will be amazing to watch how quickly that don't work.
As I got older, with my work, I became aware of the responsibility of film, and I feel one of the best ways I can apply myself as an actor, is to go beyond movie stardom and celebrity.
For my web series 'Get Your Life,' I wrote that and produced it and starred in it so that I could have a body of work that represents my voice as a writer and as a performer.
Starship Troopers was great. It was great fun to work on something with blue screens and big budget special effects. Denise Richards was nice to look at too, of course.
Your ego can become an obstacle to your work. If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.
The worst thing that can happen for a writer is for a writer to start believing their own press. I think the industry, and the comics industry in particular, is littered with the bodies of writers who believed their own press. And you can see the moment they did, and then the work nosedives.
