My parents were educated in the Turkish system and went straight from high school to medical school; my mom, who had skipped a grade, was dissecting corpses at age seventeen. Growing up in America, I think I envied my parents' education. By comparison, everything I did in school seemed so sort of low-stakes and infantilizing.

When I was growing up, many of my relatives had never seen a black person before. Today, hundreds, maybe thousands of Africans live in Istanbul's old city alone. It's hard to imagine their lives in their human totality.

Most Americans have probably heard the song 'Santa Claus Is Coming to Town' about a billion times in the supermarket alone.

For a Nabokov fan, paging through 'Fine Lines,' which includes a critical introduction and several essayistic evaluations of Nabokov's scientific oeuvre, can feel a bit like reading the second half of 'Pale Fire': one is confronted by a content-rich, almost dementedly tangential commentary on an increasingly inscrutable work.

Before I pass, I want to start an orphanage and name it after my mother. She worked with kids all her life.

If you are too busy in your church activities to take care of your family, then perhaps we had better find something else for you to do.

I'm living in Hollywood, and I'm making movies, but it goes beyond me. If my family is not doing very well, or even OK, you want them to be better.

In 'Fighting With My Family,' there's a scene where I have to wrestle; I have to do the famous fight between Paige and AJ Lee. We actually did perform it in front of all those thousands of people. And just beforehand, we had a little dress rehearsal, and there were all these famous wrestlers going around and watching as well. Terrifying.