As a child, I was always very interested in music and had friends who were in the music business. I kind of accidentally fell into it and loved it. There was no reason not to - it was a great career.

This sounds like a cliche, but I always wanted to write. After college, I did some writing and realized very quickly that it's hard to make a living as a writer. At that point, I was more interested in fiction writing.

I got a couple of stories published, but the kind of money you were making for publishing a short story, I could see I wasn't going to make a living at it.

Inside Iran, people are actually quite well-educated about America. There are things they don't understand, particularly in the government, but the people, by and large, know the American sensibility quite well, and the reverse is not true.

The way I know my father is not through media. The way I know my father is in number of different ways. It's through the people who knew him well, his friends, my family. It's also through his own words, because he wrote voluminously.

As a young girl, I plowed the fields of our family farm. I worked construction with my dad. To save for college, I worked the morning biscuit line at Hardees.

I come from a family of storytellers.

When I started on the 'Burnett' show, I was just out of high school, and when we went off the air, I was 28 years old, married with two kids. At that point I felt I really wanted to be mommy to my children. But I found that after a year and a half, I really missed the part of myself that was an actress.