It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo.
Being an actor is such a humiliating experience because you are selling yourself to the public, your face, your personality, and that is humiliating. As you get older, it becomes more humiliating because you've got less to sell.
It seems that every generation needs its public, tweedy, literary personality to sell its consumer electronics. To whatever degree I can live up to the Plimptonian legacy, I am humble and proud.
I suppose people do sometimes not understand the seeming disparity between my onstage personality and my public personality in the press. But I feel that I am definitely a louder, more outspoken person with those I am close to.
I am not a good professional of fashion. I am not an expert about how clothes are constructed or the history of fashion. I never start with fashion. I always think of the girl and her personality - because all that matters to me when you look at a page is, "Do you want to be that girl?"
I came to writing mysteries through poetry and still think that a well-constructed mystery is very much like a well-constructed sonnet. Both are artificial forms. Both start off in one direction and then, with a twist of the concluding couplet/surprising ending, both reveal that they were headed somewhere different all the time.
It's very easy to leave when things go wrong, but to stick around and to basically give life to a town because of everything that it gave you generation after generation after generation, that to me is what defines a true American.
In preindustrial times, the idea of creating something was more related to your personality. Personality was something that you constructed; it's something you had to actively develop and work on. Now personality is something that you have.
I like to be as diverse as possible. I think the humorous side and the serious side are both elements of my personality. It's what makes me who I am and if I was to neglect either one of those sides and just focus on one of them, it wouldn't be the full spectrum of my personality.
It was only after a visit to a learning centre, where they taught me public speaking, that my personality emerged.
No single crisis shapes a generation; but a succession of events, each one bringing its shaping blows to bear.
Humiliating events have a way of capturing the public's imagination. So it has been since antiquity, when gladiators were pitted against each other and the legions of Spartacus were crucified in endless rows on the way to Rome.
I am at the table. I am first generation. I am Irish-Puerto Rican. I am a single mom.
Once-in-a-generation weather events are now becoming a regular occurrence. Whether it be public safety power shutoffs or electric system failures due to extreme weather events, we must invest in grid resilience and modernization in order to keep the power on in impacted communities.
Young people have traditionally skewed left through generation after generation after generation. Exceptions to that, of course. I am one. I never have been a liberal. I rebelled against my parents, but not that way. Never been a liberal. Constitutionally incapable of being a liberal. Who knows why.
I have been keeping myself busy with events, live events, promotions, and of course, you have a child to raise and it takes an entire village to raise one, and I am a single parent.
Aeschylus and Plato are remembered today long after the triumphs of Imperial Athens are gone. Dante outlived the ambitions of thirteenth century Florence. Goethe stands serenely above the politics of Germany, and I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over cities, we too will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.