I was the teenage kid growing up in New Jersey watching the Tony Awards and thinking, 'Oh, maybe if I'm lucky I'll make it to Broadway by the time I'm 40!'

I can get motivated seeing a kid at my son's school overcome a learning disability.

I found that looking at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict from an outside vantage point was actually quite distancing. The history of the conflict, the personalities, the violence, the distrust, and the seeming lack of viable solutions made meaningful involvement feel impossible. What changed that, for me, was changing the vantage point.

Do you want to have a career that goes beyond, you know, 11 minutes in a 22-minute television show every week? Some people don't. That's fine.

We have all these politicians that claim they're pro-life and that say women should not be able to get abortions and all this other stuff... there's nothing more pro-life than helping a woman who wants to have a child have a child. Then I realized that health insurance doesn't cover IVF.

When I got to know about my cancer, I was at the rock bottom of my life, and my work suffered for it.

The only possible role that I can see for reconciliation would be to make modest changes in the major package to improve affordability, to deal with what share of Medicaid expansion the federal government pays, those kinds of issues, which is the traditional role for reconciliation in health care.

When I first came out about my breast cancer, I didn't want to talk about it, but I had to, because young women were getting it, and people weren't understanding that.