I had never experienced anything like it before and I don't think I have experienced anything like it since [on Ruapehu]. It was my dreams coming true in a way, and from there on I tended to become more of a doer than a dreamer.
It was an extraordinary experience to have backup singers like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I have never experienced anything quite like it before and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.
I did make 'Stone Cold' Steve Austin the Million Dollar Champion on Raw. You know I saw the talent in Steve and I remember telling him - because a lot of people were telling him 'You need to do more' - I remember telling him, 'Don't do anything different, because what you do is believable, it's real.'
I followed the 1.2 million people with my hand. Never faked anything. Never bought any followers or anything like that. So anything on my social media is a hundred percent real.
When death comes, it's just like winter. We don't say, "There ought not to be winter." That the winter season, when the leaves fall and the snow comes, is some kind of defeat, something which we should hold out against. No. Winter is part of the natural course of events. No winter, no summer. No cold, no heat.
I was always big. I was kind of around this size, like, since I went into high school. I played rugby and stuff like that. So, people, you know, would screw with me, but I never got into, like, a real fight or anything like that.
When an acting teacher tells a student 'that wasn't honest work' or 'that didn't seem real,' what does this mean? In life, we are rarely 'truthful' or 'honest' or 'real'. And characters in plays are almost never 'truthful' or 'honest' or 'real'. What exactly do teachers even mean by these words? A more useful question is: What is the story the actor was telling in their work? An actor is always telling a story. We all are telling stories, all the time. Story: that is what it is all about.
This business I'm in is different. It's special. The people around me feel like brothers and sisters. We hardly know each other, but we're that close; somehow there's been an immediate bonding between total strangers. We share each other's triumphs, and when one of us gets hurt, we all bleed - it's corny, I know, but it's true. I've never experienced anything like this before. It's great. It turns up the heat in life.
I remember going to the first ever DragCon, and I know this sounds crazy, but I've never experienced a ComicCon or anything like that of this nature. So it was a full carnival of extravaganza. I was a little bit more prepared the second year because I was excited to see everything.
I think love is the most misunderstood emotion in the universe. I don't think half the people know what real love is. And I don't think half the people on this planet have ever experienced it. If people experienced for one moment what real love is, we could never live the way we live with each other. We couldn't do to each other what we're doing. We couldn't ignore what we're ignoring. We couldn't allow it to be the way it is.
If you know all 4 seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter and
road construction, you may live in Canada
There's really a lot of lessons that I've learned from being Miss Universe. I don't even know where to begin. Just being able to travel a lot and meet people from different walks of life. I don't think I've experienced anything like it or would experience anything like it.
Each time I make a photograph I celebrate the life I love and the beauty I know and the happiness I have experienced. All my photographs are made like that responding to my intuition... After all these years, I am still motivated by the radiance that light creates when it transforms an object into something magical. What the eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black-and-white image is yet another transformation. What exactly exists, we may never know.
I'm telling you, until I shaved my head, I never realized how much heat is lost through the top of the head. I walk out in winter and it feels like I have an ice pack on my head. Unbelievable.
Growing up, I was lucky that my dad was never out of work. I was very fortunate in one way: that I never experienced real hardship, because my dad is this real dynamo. He was always working, so I had a sense of the ups and downs and endless disappointments, but at the same time I was never worried that we couldn't eat or pay the bills.
I've experienced industry politics and... people telling me I'm never going to make it. I'll never listen. I'm doing me.