A journalist in Toronto named Shannon Boodram saw my Facebook page and told me I was 'strikingly beautiful.' She shot a YouTube video of me, and it made a hit, grabbing thousands of views. She said the camera loved me and that I should be a model. I had never thought about modeling - it just hadn't seemed possible.

As a child, I always enjoyed - my parents used to have these little cocktail parties - and I always loved trying to get the adults to tell me things they weren't supposed to say. And in many ways, that's what my job is today; it's getting people to tell me things that they probably are otherwise not supposed to say.

I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it, which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book. But the reality is that organised religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate.

A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don't function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.

Believe it or not, I loved my Jheri curl and thought it was beautiful on me. It actually made my hair grow like crazy. What they didn't tell you back then was that once you get the Jheri curl, there's no way of getting rid of it, so when I was over it, I ended up having to cut off all my hair and start all over again.

I really don't know what happened in reference to 'The Butler.' Mr. Daniels and I had a conversation. I had the script, the email that goes along with it in reference to the character, read the script, loved it. Then I never heard from Mr. Daniels again, and the next I saw was that Oprah Winfrey is now playing the part.

I'm telling you, man, after I did 'Land of the Dead,' which Mark Canton produced, Universal picked it up, and I had to use stars. I didn't think I needed stars - Dennis Hopper was in it. I loved him. We hung out. I loved him, but his cigar budget was more than we paid for the entire budget of 'Night of the Living Dead.'

My upbringing was faith-based, but we believed you should love all others as you want to be loved, because everyone should be treated equally. That's helped me have an understanding of people on different journeys and in different walks of life. At the end of the day, we're all the same, because we all want to be loved.

There's so much to argue about. That was the goal with 'Really Really.' Somebody asked me once, 'How should I feel when I leave?' and I said, 'Hopefully, you're talkative.' I don't really care if you're happy or sad or loved it or hated it or hate me. The goal is that you have something to say, that you have a response.

I didn't know until high school that I was interested in writing in any real way. But there was this boy that I had a crush on, and I used to tell him all the time what I felt about him. Finally he gave me a blank journal and said to write it all down - and it didn't take me very long to realize how much I loved writing.

Whereas a lot of Buddhism concerns itself with stages of enlightenment, various precepts and moral codes, and even power structures and hierarchies, Zen is just like, 'Shut up, sit down, and observe your thoughts - oh, and by the way, what you perceive as you' doesn't actually exist.' I loved the minimalist approach of it.

Carol Burnett probably had the biggest influence on me as kid. Although I was very young and watched her a lot in reruns, I was mesmerized by the way she transformed, by her physical comedy and the rolling laughter from the live studio audience. I loved her most as Scarlett O'Hara and her well known Cleaning Lady character.

My thing was, I loved music. I played music: I played the saxophone. So the little bit of music knowhow I had, I tried to implement that in every thing I did, from my style, my cadence, the way I tried to pause and stagnate it; that all came from John Coltrane and listening to jazz albums. Trying to rhyme like a jazz player.

Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I'd sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn't miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either.

Every first draft sucks, so when you have your favorite novel, and you're like, 'Wow, this is a masterpiece,' and then you write your first draft, and you're like, 'This is really bad,' and then you're like 'I can't do this because this is nowhere close.' When, in reality, the book you loved so much started out just as crappy.

The last time I saw my mom was in 1997. My mom started getting sick, and my mom finally passed away in 2002. My mom was my world. My mom was everything to me. We didn't have money. We didn't have a whole lot of materialistic things, but one thing I can truly say, that my mother loved me and all of her children unconditionally.

When I was 10 years old, I loved - I loved books, and I used to haunt the secondhand bookshop. And I found a little book I could just afford, and I bought it, and I took it home. And I climbed up my favorite tree, and I read that book from cover to cover. And that was Tarzan of the Apes. I immediately fell in love with Tarzan.

Thanks to capitalism, the importance placed on beauty has never been so manipulated. We are the guinea pigs force-fed ads that tell us how pathetic we are: that we will never be loved, happy or valuable unless we have the body, the face, the hair, even the personality that will apparently be ours, if only we buy their products.

I've always loved Air Jordans. My favorite one was the Air Jordan No. 1 with the black front. What's ironic about that is I don't own a pair of those. I probably have countless pairs but they're my favorite ones. I had the poster in my room. Those are my favorite Jordan shoes of all time. I've just never bought them for myself.

I was perhaps about 10 years old when a local farmer rang us up to say he had found a young badger and would we take it in. So we did; it was a female called Bessy and she lived in the boiler room. She was extremely intelligent, had a very low opinion of cats but loved the dogs. She was pretty well trained; she went in the car.

I really love Linkin Park, and I loved Chester Bennington, and it is horrible what happened to him. I grew up listening to him because my dad would make these mixtapes with a lot of different artists - Linkin Park, Avril Lavigne, The Beatles, Sarah McLachlan, I just really loved Linkin Park, and their production is really sick.

We fought in 1974 - that was a long time ago. After 1981, we became the best of friends. By 1984, we loved each other. I am not closer to anyone else in this life than I am to Muhammad Ali. Why? We were forged by that first fight in Zaire, and our lives are indelibly linked by memories and photographs, as young men and old men.

I have always loved fashion because it's a great way to express your mood. And I'm definitely a shoe lover. The right pair of shoes can change the feel of an outfit, and even change how a woman feels about herself. A woman can wear confidence on her feet with a high stiletto, or slip into weekend comfort with a soft ballet flat.

'Lonesome Dove' was the movie. I watched that over and over and over again, and I know every line. It was one that I loved as a kid for all the horses and characters that went over my head, but then the older I got, I realized how amazing it was on so many other different levels - Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones' relationship.

That's why I loved Dinah Washington. She sung jazz, but they called her the Queen of the Blues. She had the control and sophistication of jazz in her note selection and how to attack a song or certain lines, but then attacked it with a painful force of blues behind it. That's why I admired her so much, because of that versatility.

Find something that you love to do, and find a place that you really like to do it in. I found something I loved to do. I'm a mechanical engineer by training, and I loved it. I still do. My son is a nuclear engineer at MIT, a junior, and I get the same vibe from him. Your work has to be compelling. You spend a lot of time doing it.

In the early days, I loved Facebook. I loved being able to keep tabs on hundreds of college classmates all at once, of being able to tag all my dorm mates in the photos we took on our garbage 7 megapixel cameras, of creeping on crushes, of keeping up with every person I met at a party or in a classroom without doing very much work.

Here's the thing, men have to also mature in how they see women, too. Because they need to understand that it's not just about how we look, it's about who we are. And I am going to tell you like this, 'If you can't love me with short hair, and you telling me I got to have long hair to be loved, guess what, I ain't the one for you.'

When I was a kid, I loved a heavy metal band called Motley Crue. I was thirteen when they came to my city, and I called every hotel in the Yellow Pages asking for a room by the name of their manager in hopes of meeting the band. After two or three hours of calling hotels, I got through, and the manager's brother answered the phone.

I always talk about Meredith and Derrick from 'Grey's Anatomy,' and I loved them the most when they sort of opened and closed each episode with them in bed, happy with each other, and you didn't need to insert extra conflict into them, because there was plenty of conflict in the show. So they were this port in the storm of conflict.

The thing is that love gives us a ringside seat on somebody else's flaws, so of course you're gonna spot some things that kinda need to be mentioned. But often the romantic view is to say, 'If you loved me, you wouldn't criticise me.' Actually, true love is often about trying to teach someone how to be the best version of themselves.

When I graduated from college, I went straight to work for a federal contractor, a desk job, and they were great to me, they loved me, I was like their mascot, but I just couldn't stand working in an office. I just hated it. And so one day I went in and said, 'I'm sorry, this is my two-weeks notice, I'm quitting to become an artist.'

New Year's Day. A fresh start. A new chapter in life waiting to be written. New questions to be asked, embraced, and loved. Answers to be discovered and then lived in this transformative year of delight and self-discovery. Today carve out a quiet interlude for yourself in which to dream, pen in hand. Only dreams give birth to change.

Our most fundamental social need, it turns out, to my amazement, is love. Now, I'm not a hippie-dippie whatever. If you look at the literature, our most fundamental need for children is an environment of maximum love, and that they can be hugged, kissed, and loved. That's what humanises us and allows us to realise our whole dimension.

It's always fun to visit multiple locations on one trip, but I think it also really depends on the ages of those on holiday. As a child, I loved spending time in one vacation spot, getting attached to the location, becoming comfortable, and feeling as though I were at home. This is something I would like for my children to experience.

In 1980, after 10 years at 'The Times,' I was at a crossroads in my personal life. I loved my family, but I was also so obsessive about my work that I found myself devoting more and more time to it. I wanted to be everywhere there was a good story, and that meant I had to choose between that and being with the family on important days.

When I was a kid, I used to listen to my Emerson radio late at night under the covers. I started by listening to jazz in the late 1940s and then vocal harmony groups like the Four Freshmen, the Modernaires and the Hi-Lo's. I loved Stan Kenton's big band - with those dark chords and musicians who could swing cool with individual sounds.

That's what stress management is about, that's what psychotherapy is about, finding religion, or finding your loved one or your hobby - any of those, they give you more outlets, more of a sense of control, more of a sense of predictability, of social support. They give you the means to psychologically finesse ambiguous outside reality.

I love animals; I've always loved animals. It's how I identified myself for so long, but I didn't know that in so many ways, I was living my life not in alignment with that. And once I learned about those ways I could be loving animals better, I made those changes, which made me happier and had me living a life that had me contributing.

Unworthiness is the inmost frightening thought that you do not belong, no matter how much you want to belong, that you are an outsider and will always be an outsider. It is the idea that you are flawed and cannot be fixed. It is wanting to be loved and feeling unlovable, or wanting to love and feeling that you are not capable of loving.

'Aladdin' was probably my favorite Disney animation when I was a kid. The animation was great and Robin Williams was unbelievable as the Genie. 'Aladdin' was an amazing adventure and the lead character was a hero for guys, which I loved. It wasn't a princess or a girl beating the odds; it was a street rat. That seemed really cool to me.

Our veterans and service members are known for their strength, but when they're recovering from an operation or receiving emergency care, that strength can depend on seeing a spouse, talking with the kids or just knowing that loved ones are by their side. It isn't difficult to imagine what a difference keeping families together can make.

A quarter of America is a dramatic, tense, violent country, exploding with contradictions, full of brutal, physiological vitality, and that is the America that I have really loved and love. But a good half of it is a country of boredom, emptiness, monotony, brainless production, and brainless consumption, and this is the American inferno.

My fans saw 'Roll Bounce,' but also that older crowd who might not have been familiar with me on the music tip saw 'Roll Bounce' and loved it. 'Roll Bounce' opened up that door for me to have older people love Bow Wow and opened up that door so all of the kids would love Bow Wow. My fan base is really diverse; it's all ages and all colors.

The United States Postal Service is one of America's oldest and most well-loved institutions. Thanks to the Postal Service, families can send letters and packages to loved ones they have not seen in months, small businesses are able to ship products to their customers, and many veterans and seniors can safely receive lifesaving medications.

I've always enjoyed shopping and loved fashion, but my interest as an entrepreneur was definitely more about the opportunities I saw to change the future of retail. My sister was a buyer in New York, and she knew my body and my style, and she could find me things I loved. I thought, 'What if everybody had access to this kind of experience?'

There's nothing better than having a baby. I've always loved children. I used to work summers at the YMCA and be in charge of, like, 30 preschool kids. I knew that when I had a child, I'd be overwhelmed, and it's true... I can't tell you how much my attitude has changed since we've got Frances. Holding my baby is the best drug in the world.

We lived in just a studio apartment with just a room and a bed that came out of the wall, and my mom couldn't afford even a Happy Meal. We ate Top Ramen. I had no toys, and I had, like, two shirts, a pair of jeans, and that was it. But I had my mom to myself, and I remember it being the coolest period of time. I loved it. I really loved it.

I am what I am. I'm not going to get plastic surgery. I had this discussion with my younger son. We were at a dermatologist, and this dermatologist suggested to me that I wanted to avoid wrinkles. Those wrinkles show that I have laughed a lot in my life, why should I want to erase that? Why would I erase the traces of my life which I loved?

I have always loved watermelon and relish any opportunity to eat it, whether plain or diced up with feta and mint and tossed with a little olive oil. It makes me think of summertime. On set and at home, I try to always have a container of watermelon sprinkled with cinnamon because it elevates the flavor just a notch and makes it feel special.

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