I've been happily married to Chris for almost 20 years.

I'm a layperson. I barely got out of high school. I have no business telling people what to do or my big philosophy on life. I'm certainly not going to write any sort of memoir.

I work with The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. I sit proudly as one of only two recovering addicts on their board.

I was doing a children's book on self-esteem, and I really felt like I wanted to shed the shame I'd been feeling - and maybe make it easier for women my age who had probably felt bad about themselves.

I try to go to the gym three times a week. And I have to watch what I eat. I'm a normal person.

I think my capacity to change has given me tremendous happiness, because who I am today I am completely content to be.

I think I felt that I was very well known for my figure and needed to keep that up for my work. And I regret all of it. I felt fraudulent and very shameful.

I talk too much.

I love performing and pretending - it's very easy for me.

I can play rhythm guitar. I know how to hold a guitar and strum it.

Hollywood is the backdrop of my family, and I know that the movie business is incredibly cruel as you get older.

Being an actor, you are recognized for being somebody else, whereas these books are distilled from me.

Because I know I'm an addict, and I know I'm an alcoholic.

And I was ashamed of myself for feeling like I had to do that in order to look a certain way. I felt misshapen, just not natural anymore. And I think it was a big stimulator of my drug use.

All the work built my fame and certainly made me more money, but the toll it took in my home was not good.

Actually, the books were never a planned career path.

I thought, while they're up and firm, why not shoot them once or twice.

I used to dream of being normal. For me, if Kirk Douglas walked into the house, that was normal.

I'm a tidy, neat person. But I'm not a maniac.

I'm age-appropriate. I dress age-appropriately, I choose mates age-appropriately. I'm a big believer in people should act their age.

It's not that I'm retired; I just no longer accept acting work.

I'm a human being who lives a flawed, contradictory life. And I have all sorts of problems and all sorts of successes.

I've had a little plastic surgery. I've had a little lipo. I've had a little Botox. And you know what? None of it works. None of it.

If I'm honest I don't think the world would miss me if I never acted again.

Kids are going to try drugs and alcohol; that's part of society.

I never represented glam. That's the thing, you'll never see me in the front row of a fashion show. I'm uninterested in it. I find it trivial and banal and boring.

I'm not a prophet. I'm not a teacher. I have no degrees. My degree is from the University of Life.

If you just watch a teenager, you see a lot of uncertainty.

I've always put my family first and that's just the way it is.

I've been going through photos of my mother, looking back on her life and trying to put it into context. Very few people age gracefully enough to be photographed through their aging.

I think happiness comes from self-acceptance. We all try different things, and we find some comfortable sense of who we are. We look at our parents and learn and grow and move on. We change.

I'm uninterested in superheroes. I am only interested in real stories, real people, real connection.

Getting sober just exploded my life. Now I have a much clearer sense of myself and what I can and can't do. I am more successful than I have ever been. I feel very positive where I never did before, and I think that's all a direct result of getting sober.

I wasn't the kid who lined up her toys, although when it came to Barbies and that little traveling wardrobe with the drawers and the little shoes, my stuff was always on hangers and the shoes were always in pairs. Things had their places.

My deal was that they would use a full-length picture of me in my underwear and a full-length picture of me all done up, and they would write about how long it took and how much it cost, because that was the whole point. It was very liberating.

Modern women are just bombarded. There's nothing but media telling us we're all supposed to be great cooks, have great style, be great in bed, be the best mothers, speak seven languages, and be able to understand derivatives. And we don't really have women we're modeling after, so we're all looking for how to do this.

The biggest lesson I've learned from my children is to look in the mirror at myself, not at them. I've realized that everything I've done has had an impact on them. We have to understand that they are like little paparazzi. They take our picture when we don't want them to and then they show it to us in their behavior.

The challenging part of parenting for me is to make sure that an individual person is an individual and not some sort of cookie-cutter version of me. At the same time, I want to make sure that I impart my sense of the world as an adult.

I guess I want very much to be recognized for my abilities, for the work I put in, and yet it's still always there - who my parents were. As much as I love my parents, if that was the last thing ever said about me - that I was their daughter - I would be disappointed that my contributions weren't strong enough on their own.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.

A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.

The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Angry people are not always wise.

I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.

But for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.