I probably have more male friends that talk about us in a way that doesn't thrill me. I sometimes get a bit surprised when females talk like that around men.

As a matter of fact [my mother] is very happily married. To a very nice southern gentleman named Roanoke - her first non-Jewish husband, as she likes to say.

I did the traditional thing with falling in love with words, reading books and underlining lines I liked and words I didn't know. It was something I always did.

I've been there for a couple of people when they were dying; it didn't look like fun. But if I was gonna do it, I'd want someone like me around. And I will be there!

My parents had this incredibly vital relationship with an audience, like muscle with blood. This was the main competition I had for my parents' attention: an audience.

I'm in a business where the only thing that matters is weight and appearance. That is so messed up. They might as well say 'Get younger,' because that's how easy it is.

My inner world seems largely to consist of three rotating emotions: embarrassment, rage, and tension. Sometimes I feel excited, but I think that's just positive tension.

I've often said to myself, "Thank God I can write, 'cause this is hilarious." I actually wanted to go into all that more in the book, but my editor thought it was too crazy.

I have two moods. One is Roy, rollicking Roy, the wild ride of a mood. And Pam, sediment Pam, who stands on the shore and sobs... Sometimes the tide is in, sometimes it's out.

I don't think 50-50 relationships exist. Men have an incredibly variety of options. It's much harder for a woman to do both things. I think traditional relationships work best.

The message about sex and relationships that she had gotten as a child... was confused, contradictory. Sex was for men, and marriage, like lifeboats, was for women and children.

If some gang were threatening your family, you'd go looking for someone butch to help, right? Any maybe if your mother were sick or something, you'd find someone a bit more fey.

I guess high verbal skills are highest in my list of necessary qualifications for a man - for anyone actually. I like to talk. And I don't necessarily move far, but I move fast.

All I know is that you can chop up all the onions and the whatevers you want and put it on top of caviar, but you still can't disguise the fact that you're eating fish eggs. Ugh!

In the Fifties, my parents were known as 'America's sweethearts'. Their pictures graced the covers of all the newspapers. They were the Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston of their day.

I think of my body as a side effect of my mind. Like a thought I had once that manifested itself-- Oops! Oh no! Manifested. Look at this. Now we have to buy clothes and everything.

If you're manic-depressive and you're functioning in this world and doing it all well, I think, wow, you should be proud of being able to say, this is what I'm getting through right now.

I overheard people saying, 'She thinks she's so great because she's Debbie Reynolds' daughter!' And I didn't like it; it made me different from other people, and I wanted to be the same.

I get lots of awards for being mentally ill. Apparently, I am better at being mentally ill than almost anything else I've ever done. Seriously - I have a shelf of awards for being bipolar.

Look,' he said, 'I don't think we should continue this discussion. I don't like this side of you.' 'I'm not a box,' she said 'I don't have sides. This is it. One side fits all. This is it.

Sometimes I think all I want to find is a mean guy and make him be nice to me. Or maybe a nice guy who's a little bit mean to me. But they're usually too nice too soon or too mean too long.

I was telling some people in my dressing room some of my other stories, my psychotic break, and blah, blah, blah, and no, they kind of look at you and it's just not what they wanted to hear.

I envy people who have the capacity to sit with another human being and find them endlessly interesting, I would rather watch TV. Of course this becomes eventually known to the other person.

Mania starts off fun, not sleeping for days, keeping company with your brain, which has become a wonderful computer, showing 24 TV channels all about you. That goes horribly wrong after awhile.

I don't want to be thought of as a survivor because you have to continue getting involved in difficult situations to show off that particular gift, and I'm not interested in doing that anymore.

I mean, that's at least in part why I ingested chemical waste - it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the CliffNotes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-column read.

I would rather not watch myself in movies. I enjoy the experience, but I won't really see the film until they're on cable deep on into my life so I can pretend it's someone else at another time.

What I always wanna tell young people now: Pay attention. This isn't gonna happen again. Rather than try to understand it as it's going along, have it go along for a while and then understand it.

I was born on October 21, 1956 in Burbank, California. My father, Eddie Fisher, was a famous singer. My mother, Debbie Reynolds, was a movie star. Her best-known role was in 'Singin' In The Rain.'

I will usually be in denial about that, too, because I really don't like that. Sometimes I will recognize it and sometimes someone will say, "are you okay?" And then you think, "Oh, maybe I'm not."

My mom is a little bit eccentric. I mean, she does - she has a lot of unique ideas. For example, she thought that I should have a child with her last husband, Richard, because it would have nice eyes.

The parrots are great. They do something I refer to as "the Phone Call from Venus." They repeat all my phone conversations. It can very annoying - like having a lot of children in the house screaming.

We treat beauty like an accomplishment, and that is insane. Everyone in L.A. says, 'Oh, you look good,' and you listen for them to say you've lost weight. It's never 'How are you?' or 'You seem happy!'

You knew how humiliating that is as an experience for celebrities to be less of a celebrity. There's no class to adjust to being less famous, and you don't think you have to worry about it. But you do.

My comfort wasn't the most important thing - my getting through to the other side of difficult feelings was. However long it might seem to take, and however unfair it might seem, it was my job to do it.

[I was filmed] against a blue screen [in the Star Wars]. All the rest came later, in Lucasland. They did have me take gun lessons, though. I went to the same guys who taught Robert De Niro for Taxi Driver.

All I can say is that when millions of plastic dolls of you are being sold each day and an equal number of teenage boys are masturbating over you each night, it's bound to do something screwy to your psyche.

Meg Ryan was nice [ in When Harry Met Sally] ... the writing was good ... but it was really kind of a boy's club, I mean, there was Bruno Kirby, Rob Reiner, Billy Crystal - talk about your testosterone trio!

My father was a joyous, joyous spirit, he really was. He was a hedonist, that was just - he enjoyed life, thrust up to the elbows with it. He was a terrible father. I don't know that he was parented that well.

All my life I've been seeing things through the culture. My father, for instance, was the press's bad boy. People really hated him. He was always a big flirt. He was always in trouble - going bankrupt, whatever.

There are very few women from my mother's generation who worked like that, who just kept a career going all her life and raised children and had horrible relationships and lost all her money and got it back again.

So when I was 24, someone suggested to me that I was bipolar, and I thought that was ridiculous. I just thought he was trying to get out of treating me. But he was also responding to the chaotic nature of my life.

There's a line I have that our family was designed more for public than for private. But there are definitely some things that are only mine. I am someone who dreams at night, and you don't know what I'm dreaming.

This actress named Lisa Eilbacher. I was up for the part in Shampoo and friends of mine kept telling me she was going around saying all these bad things about me. It's like we're still in the sixth grade sometimes.

I rarely think about my childhood. It's a slippery thing I can't keep hold of for long - it slithers out of my grasp. And a lot of the time I remember what was missing instead of what was there. I am a chronicler of absence.

Oh! This'll impress you - I'm actually in the Abnormal Psychology textbook. Obviously my family is so proud. Keep in mind though, I'm a PEZ dispenser and I'm in the abnormal Psychology textbook. Who says you can't have it all?

Eventually, life of the party is just like any other job. I've thought of myself that way at times, but it's sort of like holding everybody hostage. It diminishes everyone else. And ultimately, your friends don't require it of you.

I have a harder time eating properly than I do exercising. It's easier for me to add an activity than to deny myself something. And when I do lose the weight, I don't like that it makes me feel good about myself. It's not who I am.

I'm fine, but I'm bipolar. I'm on seven medications, and I take medication three times a day. This constantly puts me in touch with the illness I have. I'm never quite allowed to be free of that for a day. It's like being a diabetic.

What I really like is the marriage of both [writing and acting] - for instance, with Postcards. I don't actually act in it, but I worked on it with Mike [Nichols] as I went along, creating the character, so it was a bit like acting for me.

Share This Page