Especially around Valentine's Day, it's easy to find advice about sustaining a successful marriage, with suggestions for 'date nights' and romantic dinners for two. But as we spend more and more of our lives outside marriage, it's equally important to cultivate the skills of successful singlehood.

Trust me, there's not one night a week I'm not in a theater somewhere. I adore theater, and I go out with friends, so I do have some nights off.

I actually think some of my best moments in life have been while I was with people from Instagram - whether it's super late nights getting a release out or being able to travel to places I'd never visited and meeting some of the most interesting people I've ever met.

I went to a performance-art high school, and a teacher there was signing me up for open-mic nights at the comedy club. I think about it now, and I think, 'Well, that may be inappropriate,' but it was great!'

There is no royal flower strewn path to success. And if there is, I have not found it, for whatever success I have attained has been the result of much hard work and many sleepless nights.

I went to every sports contest for my kids. I turned off my cell phone at 8 P.M. I did have to travel relentlessly and had some nights at black tie events. But when I was home, I was home.

I always wanted to be a cowboy, and Jedi Knights are basically cowboys in space, right?

I enjoy some nights in the studio. I'm not the greatest person in an enclosed space; I'm a live player by birth - like a gypsy folk player, I just sit in the corner and play.

When you have a nightmare, you think, 'What caused this?' And then you can sometimes get the same scenario two or three nights, back to back. Or something really bad happens, and you feel absolutely sad and do not want it to be real. You don't want to fall asleep and get sucked back into that same dream.

My husband, Sal, and I put date nights on the calendar once a week. I know that doesn't sound romantic, but otherwise it won't get done.

I'm a hopeless romantic, and very much the person in a relationship to go: If things are going well, I'll buy the flowers, remember the dates of things, plan fun nights out.

I don't know where my romanticism comes from. My mom and dad would read to me a lot. 'Treasure Island,' 'Robinson Crusoe,' tales of chivalry and knights, things like that. Those are the stories I loved growing up.

Those fields of daisies we landed on, and dusty fields and desert stretches. Memories of many skies and earths beneath us - many days, many nights of stars.

I started out in 1989 doing open mic nights. The first 10 years, I was literally all about I'm going to be a star. I want leather pants, I want a kangaroo, I want to be on 'MTV Cribs,' I want to go to the mall with a pet monkey and I want everyone to go, 'Wow, that guy's huge, he's successful.'

Being a caregiver requires infinite patience, physical and emotional strength, health care navigation skills, and a sense of humor - which can be hard to come by after sleepless nights and demanding days.

I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on summer humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives.

It's a political and manipulative industry. Actors vie for the same roles, movies are snatched away. Have I ever been manipulated? Yes. But I haven't manipulated anyone because if you think from the heart, you cannot be calculative. I have spent nights crying.

I made over forty Westerns. I used to lie awake nights trying to think up new ways of getting on and off a horse.

Now, on nights that I can't sleep, I play video games alone until the morning.

There would be nights when I would wake up and couldn't get back to sleep. So I would go downstairs and write. The staff had a pool going on how many pages of typing I would bring in here in the morning.

We were making new ones the second year. We were in syndication the second year. So we were on Saturday nights, prime time, every morning, and then they put it on Sunday evenings too. So it was all over the place.

I rarely went to the mosque, I never fasted, and I only prayed namaaz on the holy nights because my mom bugged me about it.

I was injured by an enemy hand grenade in Afghanistan in 2010. I spent three years recovering at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center... And through that three years, I was forced to search for the silver linings during the long dark and painful nights and days in the hospital.

As a medical student, you have to study every day. You can't cover the syllabus by studying for a few nights before your exam.