When you're learning, especially to write, unless you're some incredibly gifted writer, a young Malcom Gladwell, say, you need to be imitating people. You need to be imitating how they make their work, how they structure it, how they design the pieces. It gives you chops; it gives you moves.

I wish somebody had given me the news that ideas don't just fall on your head like fairy dust. You have to treat that like a job. You have to spend hours each day, where you're just like, 'This is the part of the day when I'm looking for an idea.'

My first job on the radio was writing jokes for a Baltimore DJ called Johnny Walker, who was sort of a '70s era shock jock who all the teenage boys listened to in my school.

One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense. So you can control peoples' attention simply by having things move forward in a story.

The most difficult thing in the world is to start a career known only for your looks, and then to try to become a serious actress. No one will take you seriously once you are known as the pretty woman.

I appreciate everything. I built my career from very humble beginnings. Every job I've had, every next rung on the ladder, I appreciate because I know where it started - I started doing Pac-Man vitamin commercials.

Facebook is the social graph with the organizing principle around your friends and your social life. LinkedIn is the professional graph, organized around you, your job, your industry, your title and your function. At Chegg, we are building a student graph centered around you, as a student.

Snowboarding is a huge part of my life, but I also feel like it's important to have a plan B or a back-up plan for after my career because I can't snowboard for my whole life competitively.