I'm a secret interior decorator. There's a mural on my dining room wall of the railroad tracks at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. I love having my hometown with me out here in California.

When you get a jean for a larger girl, you have to have them tailored for you. Tailoring is indeed everything.

Music shouldn't be a chore or feel like any kind of burden.

The artists who stand out to me have a passion for what they do. There are a lot of people who can sing. It's just like when you go to church and people are singing because it sounds good, not because it feels good. There's a difference.

A nutritionist has told me to have very little butter and very little spices, but I can't live like that.

I think every individual has his or her own power, and it's a matter of working, taking time and defining what that power is.

In order to grow emotionally and mentally, sometimes you have to grow physically as well. I'm just trying to grow, man, and always I just want to be the best and most confident me I can be.

Once I started looking for a record deal, I had a trainer. And the trainer told me that I would never sell a record if I didn't lose weight.

Lately I've been going to all these high schools talking to the students, answering their questions, listening to what they have to say. It has been an incredible journey to be around them and try to give them what my mother gave me.

People is, I think, it's their nature - some people's nature, in a way, to be angry or jealous or just spiteful about somebody else's blessings.

You have to be humble when you're dealing with God.

I'm a girl who enjoys a great meal with great friends, so I'm not really that concerned about weight loss.

When I write a song, I tap into the emotion and the feeling and then I use the emotion to write the words. It's the opposite when I act. I use the words and tap into the emotion.

I didn't leave home until 27. I was an only child raised in Philadelphia by my mother and grandmother. My grandmother controlled the stove. She made a lot of potato meals - mashed potato, potato souffle, potato pancakes. When we didn't have electricity, we ate romantically by candlelight.

I think human beings will always still really enjoy using our imaginations, and 'Fringe' allows you to do that. It's slightly scary and believable. There just might be an alternate universe. There just might be people on the other side that are like us, living a different life.

I always wanted to be a renaissance woman, do as many things as I possibly can and hopefully do them well or don't do them at all.

When I get onstage, I automatically feel beautiful.

It excites me when a person puts their whole self in a song or rhyme, or instrument. It fills me.

As slavery died for the greater good of America, and the movement for equality sputtered to life, the white woman was on the cover of every American magazine. She was the dazzling jewel on every movie screen, the glory of every commercial and television show.

I've been around the world and I've had bras made in different places, and each time I'm experiencing the same troubles: the painful shoulders, the underwire cutting into my flesh.

My heart and prayers go out to all single moms because it's tough, and I can't imagine any teenager dealing with a baby and all those hormones raging.

All I have to do is be me on stage. But acting, I have to be someone else, and walk how they would walk and blink how they would blink. I used to talk about it bad like, 'Aw man, that person made $10 million a movie?' But now I understand why they do. I get it now.

I think of myself as a producer. As a producer and as a showrunner, I already understand what it meant to gather people into a room and step back, to create the boundaries of 'everything's okay' to allow TV writers to go to their craziest places.

I'm embarrassed that people will know that I can't ride a bicycle. For years, I have been feigning bad ankles and saying I wasn't in the mood for a bike ride.

There's something about the kind of unconditional wild joy of creating that you have with your siblings that I am always trying to get back to.

I'm a naturally open person - some might say radically open.

When I write, I lose time. I'm happy in a way that I have a hard time finding in real life. The intimacy between my brain and my fingers and my computer... Yet knowing that that intimacy will find an audience... It's very satisfying. It's like having the safety of being alone with the ego reward of being known.

Guys, there's only one thing I hate more than bloggers who start sentences with 'guys' - and it's those mealy-mouth hipsters who crochet codpieces and their ye-olde-sideburned friends who pickle stuff and slaughter their own gluten-free goats.

The first time that I saw people actually make the thing that I wrote was my first episode of 'Six Feet Under.' It was called 'Back To The Garden.'

I'm a minimalist Jew, but on Friday night, I celebrate Shabbat. At sundown, we light candles, say the blessing, and I don't turn on my computer for 24 hours.

My sister and I are incredibly close, and we created together from childhood through the time we spent in Chicago at the Annoyance Theatre.

For clothes, I like this little store on Fountain, Matrushka Construction. Beth Ann Whittaker and Laura Howe make amazing things. You can get a designer skirt with cool embroidery for 40 bucks instead of $400 or $4,000.

The inbox is always open in my brain, and anyone can get in any time and access me. Turning it off is taking back control. I decide who gets in. It's about emotional privacy, having a self.

So many features at Sundance seemed to be powered more on the director's need to be a director than any particular story.

I've always been really interested in secrets - how people find ways of doing things without telling anyone else in order to keep themselves feeling safe in the world.

My sister and I created a show called 'The Real Life Brady Bunch,' which was sort of a theatrical sensation that got us attention in L.A. and New York.

I really like writing television, and I like the collaborative writers room feeling. It's ten people, and you're together every day laughing your heads off.

I was the kind of Jew who'd be in a bar, somebody would say it's Yom Kippur, and I'd go, 'Really?'

I'm always going for truth and honesty.

People who don't have experience setting healthy boundaries, they have secrets instead.

It's hard enough to be a lady writer. Doubly hard to be a funny lady writer.

Watching 'Girls,' it was really angering for me at first, because I really had spent decades hiding unlikable, unattractive Jewish girls in likable, attractive, non-Jewish actors and characters.

I always wanted to find my voice and claim my tone, but I was doing it through the steps of being a TV writer. I had the executive producer title. I was running the room.

If there's a woman who is exhibiting her femininity or performing her femininity, it's always seen as meant to pull in the male gaze.

At East Side Jews, we can take a risk because it isn't all about the rules. I started it to create a space for all those people who wouldn't go to temple because they were scared of getting the rules wrong.

Normally, I think the people you would use on your first film, it would be a real struggle to bring them with you onto your television show. I just brought every single person with and expanded my little indie film world.

I've been playing with this idea in my mind that the hero's journey that we're all taught as screenwriters may resonate more specifically for male protagonists and maybe even male viewers.

From the moment you say 'action,' this is the fun part - things should happen that surprise you, excite you, scare you, turn you on, make you laugh. If things aren't surprising you, when you say 'cut,' whisper things to the actors that will make them do things that do surprise you.

If you're in a room and can be seen by actors, you need to understand that you can be felt by them.

What I have to offer as a writer/director is the stuff with the feeling in it.