I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.

I was going to be a teacher. I was applying to graduate school when I got the call to do 'Same Love,' actually. I was gonna go to Boston University for my masters in teaching.

Playing in New England and the Boston area, the fans are so passionate about their sports if you don't play well, they'll let you know so I know it's not something that they take lightly.

One of my first jobs was at the Boston Globe. I worked in the sports department six months a year. When I was ready to graduate, the sports editor gave me a job as a schoolboy sports writer.

I was also the romantic lead in The Boston Strangler - I was the only one that lived to tell the story - so I called myself the romantic lead.

I lived to play basketball. Growing up as a kid, Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics were my favorite team. The way they played, the teamwork, the sacrifice, the commitment, the joy, the camaraderie, the relationship with the fans.

One of our biggest pet peeves is listening to bands that use harmony guitars for the sake of it. If you can't figure out how do something different than Maiden, UFO, or even Boston, then what's the point?

If you're strutting around Beverly Hills and hitting up these big industry parties every night when you're not making movies, then it's going to eventually consume you. But for me, I live most of my life in Boston. I do things no different from the way my buddies back home do them, except when I go to work, I go to a film set.

I went to Dartmouth College, graduated, and had the opportunity to play two professional sports - I played for the New England Patriots in the NFL and professional lacrosse for the Boston Blazers. I had an injury, so I had to stop so I could heal. But when I was playing football, I wasn't making a lot of money; I wasn't a superstar.

My mom grew up in Idaho, went to Brigham Young University: they're very Molly Mormon. And my father is, like, first generation Albanian, and his parents lived in Southey and grew up in downtown Boston. My parents are complete opposites.

When I was 12, I was living in Iowa, and I emailed so many wrestling schools, and one of them was actually in Boston. I joined it at 18 - the New England Pro Wrestling Academy. They were doing a fantasy camp. I was 17 about to turn 18. I told my mom, 'I'm 18 now. I just signed these papers by myself, and I'm going to do this.'

In my eyes, there's heroes I look up to. People who saved me - my caretakers, people at Boston Medical Center. My surgeon. The people that pulled me off that ground, who pulled me out. Those are my heroes. The police. The paramedics. Those are the true heroes.

Boston had the first public library, Liverpool had the first lending library. Both cities have pioneered medical advancements during the decades and both have the largest economic powers in the world exactly 213 miles to the south by car.

I think of myself as a fairly logical, scientific and somewhat reserved person. Maura Isles, the Boston medical examiner who appears in five of my books, is me. Almost everything I use in describing her, from her taste in wine to her biographical data, is taken from my own family. Except I don't have a serial killer as a mother!

Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack.

On my first day on the set of 'Boston Legal,' I thought the director was calling me 'Candice' instead of 'Constance.' But I didn't realize he was actually talking to Candice Bergen.

When it comes to fighting for progress in Boston, there's a long history of people in power trying to label advocacy and hard work as being political in order to avoid accountability and distract from community demands for better leadership.

I wanted to be a veterinarian and go to school in Boston. It didn't quite work out that way, and I ended up joining the Navy as a suggestion of my big brother. It was really awesome - and I didn't realize it at the time, -but provided a lot of leadership and followership teamwork opportunities.

In the drive to prove our status as a world-class city, let's stay true to our democratic legacy and what Boston has already given to the world: informed independence and true debate.

Boston is always going to be a second home for me.

Every successful social movement in this country's history has used disruption as a strategy to fight for social change. Whether it was the Boston Tea Party to the sit-ins at lunch counters throughout the South, no change has been won without disruptive action.

Boston is actually the capital of the world. You didn't know that? We breed smart-ass, quippy, funny people. Not that I'm one of them. I just sorta sneaked in under the radar.

When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive; great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement.

I wanted to be a political science professor and go to school in Boston. I never wanted to be a big, famous movie star and TV star. It kind of found me.