I know now that everybody in the arts is forever a beginner. Experience counts for a great deal and very little. Every night onstage I feel I am starting from scratch, still not quite sure what I am doing and where I am going, thrown by the simplest thing that goes wrong.

Don't tell your kids you had an easy birth or they won't respect you. For years I used to wake up my daughter and say, 'Melissa you ripped me to shreds. Now go back to sleep.'.

Don't cook. Don't clean. No man will ever make love to a woman because she waxed the linoleum.

What are people going to do? Fire me? I've been fired before. Not book me? I've been out of work before. I don't care.

to maintain success, stamina is more important than talent. You have to learn to be a marathon runner.

my cousin Shirley, who never complains, screamed and screamed when she was having her baby. True, this was just during conception.

And since we're all adults here, let's be brutally honest-most babies are not actually attractive. In fact, they're weird and freakish looking. A large percentage of them are squinty-eyed and bald and their faces are all mushed toegther, kind of like Renee Zellweger pushed up against a glass window.