I firmly believe we can make our own miracles if we believe strongly enough in ourselves and our mission on earth.

Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than the belief that she is beautiful.

Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.

Any woman can look her best if she feels good in her skin. It's not a question of clothes or makeup. It's how she sparkles.

I'd much rather eat pasta and drink wine than be a size 0.

You have to enjoy life. Always be surrounded by people that you like, people who have a nice conversation. There are so many positive things to think about.

The most indespensible ingredient of all good home cooking: love for those you are cooking for.

Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.

When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.

Learn to use your brains as deftly as your powder box, and then maybe you have a powder box and do not need.

A woman's dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.

She is so lovely she could kill you without you even noticing it. A monster girl who knows when to kiss and when to kill.

But who ever yet was offered a secret and declined it? Who at least ever declined a love secret? What sister could do so?

There are about five or six songs that were written in full or in part while I was in Iraq, and that was definitely a life-changing experience. There was no shortage of inspiration.

I haven't turned into some rich monster. I've kept my perspective. But I am a bit spoiled. It's hard not to be a little spoiled by having a lot of money.

The night before the Olympics opening ceremony, my son, who is eight years old, gets very excited and likes to put out a plate of cookies and some milk for Bob Costas.

I think bears and worms aren't very similar... until you think of gummy.

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the sombre renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings.

My father (Danny Thomas) used to tell me there are two kinds of people, the takers and the givers. 'The takers sometimes eat better,' he would say, 'but the givers always sleep better.'

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

I feel ghostly unreal until I become somebody else again on the screen.