If my kid couldn't draw I'd make sure that my kitchen magnets didn't work.

You can have anything you want, but not everything. If it was really important to spend an afternoon at my daughter's school, I had to think, how was I going to organize my life to do that? How could I become more efficient? I always tried to put my priorities on the table, personal and professional, and work around them.

My natural accent is American. I chose to speak with a U.K. accent when I was about to enter the final year at drama school in London. I was going to try to find a way to stay in the U.K. after I finished college and could not imagine trying to live and get work there with an American accent.

Mostly, my flying has been solo, but the preparation for it wasn't. Without my husband's help and encouragement, I could not have attempted what I have. Ours has been a contented and reasonable partnership, he with his solo jobs and I with mine. But always with work and play together, conducted under a satisfactory system of dual control.

It's like gambling somehow. You go out for a night of drinking and you don't know where your going to end up the next day. It could work out good or it could be disastrous. It's like the throw of the dice.

Two months after I got out of test pilot school, I saw an advert that said NASA was recruiting more astronauts. The best job you could have as a test pilot was being an astronaut, so I volunteered.

I do interviews because it's a chance to be myself. I sometimes wonder what I could have to say that would be of any interest. I don't have any great wisdom.

It was the Michael Jordan/Nike phenomenon that really let people see that athletes were OK, and black athletes were OK. Defying a previous wisdom - not only that black athletes wouldn't sell in white America, but that the NBA as a predominantly black sport could not sell in white America.

Many of us spend half of our time wishing for things we could have if we didn't spend half our time wishing.

Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn't be done.

Well we thought a church wedding would be possible. It certainly would be possible in the Catholic church because after all my first marriage had been annulled by Pope Paul VI. The problem arose in that Prince Michael could not have Catholic children.

I've always worn my wedding band when I'm working out. A few years ago I realized how dangerous wearing a metal band could be and switched to silicone.

I moved to Los Angeles in January 2004 because a buddy of mine, who I met at a friend's wedding, said he could get me a room in his apartment for $500 a month. I took it thinking that it would probably only be about six months before I moved back to Chicago, but I fell in love with it.

At first, when we got engaged, I asked him if we could just go to Vegas and get married by Elvis, just because I didn't want to deal with planning a wedding.

My grandmother was sick and I was told that we could not tell her, and that my cousin was gonna have this wedding as an excuse for us to all go and see her. And I think that I was just so frustrated by the situation.

You know how Oprah has her moment about bread? Mine's about boots. You could wear it to a meeting at work. You could wear it to a date.You could wear it to a wedding with a suit.

I've had the kind of complex life I write about. I was a single mother for 12 years. I'd been engaged. The wedding fell through. I then discovered I was pregnant and opted to have the child on my own. I was a professor. I was in my mid-30s. I could manage it financially.

I went to a wedding in St. Maarten, and we took a boat ride over to Anguilla for a day. We went to a beach that had the whitest sand I had ever seen before in my life. I was in the water up to the middle of my chest and could still see my feet. It was the clearest water.

I originally thought I would be going into wedding dresses. I wanted to create gowns, especially for weddings. I liked the idea of dealing with just one color, and within that, you could design whatever you want.

Young people: marry simply, start your life, and party later. Think of how much babysitting for your future colicky baby you could buy with that wedding budget. Think of how much marriage therapy you could buy. Invest in your marriage, not your wedding.

My wedding dress is a piece of art that I'll treasure forever. It was designed and created by Zac Posen. I gave him only the tiniest bit of direction when he started, and the end product was more beautiful than anything I could have imagined.

I think when wedding dresses are talked about, every woman has a different set of factors in her mind of what it could be because they've been thinking about it possibly for such a long time.

We always talk about how the first several seasons were faithful to the books, and anybody who wanted to could go onto Wikipedia and learn Ned Stark gets beheaded or about The Red Wedding, and most people don't want to know - because why ruin a story?

Whenever I went to a wedding or a party, girls kept complaining about their shoes. I love to dance, and I wanted them to have shoes they could keep on all night.