My mom started smoking when she was 11. She went to the hill next door to try her first cigarette. She set the entire hill on fire, but it didn't deter her.

I have an education degree from the University of Minnesota, and I was a teacher for about a minute.

My grandmother was a teacher, my sister was a teacher, my daughter was a teacher and is now a superintendent in northern California, and my son-in-law is a high school principal. I am surrounded.

Your lungs are changed forever from your first cigarette.

I started acting when I was 10, doing musical theater. I was a brunette at that time. I was always cast in all the exotic parts.

My memory of my mom is a wine glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She was a runway fashion model, and she was quite a glamorous woman.

I'd had my daughter when I was a teenager - I took my daughter to college with me.

My daughter teases me once in a while saying, Remember when you used to be my mother and you had black hair?

I've always been very involved in anything that had to do with lung disease or cancer.

My sister and I are both diagnosed with second-hand smoke syndromes. We have never smoked, but we grew up with second-hand smoke our entire lives.

Impotence is one of the major hazards of cigarette smoking.

Ask Your Higher Self

Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything.

I looked in the mirror and realized that I was already dead. I let you kill me one piece at a time, starting when I was, what? Eight years old? Nine? You killed yourself and then you came after us.

I wish for magic this season, laughter and fun.I wish for mistletoe kisses-those sparkly ones.

A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe."(on Mark Twain)

Spielberg read the 'Understudy' and decided that was the voice he wanted to write 'Smash.' He wanted a story that had humanity and humor and high-stakes dreams.

We should not be pushing out figured when the facts are in the opposite direction.

Quotas are bad for America. It's not the way America is all about.

I started in a business background, but then it was like, 'you know, I can't do math,' so I changed it to a liberal arts degree and got my Bachelor of Arts in Communications and it made sense.

I'm pretty aware that the pursuit of perfection is, inherently, a flawed concept.