Throughout my 20s and early 30s, I had jobs that I loved. I worked in city government. I ran a youth organization. I served as an associate dean at a university. And I couldn't imagine how a baby would fit into all of that.

My family didn't have a lot of money, so I worked my heart out to get my degrees. But the minute I graduated, suddenly everyone was asking me, 'Well, when are you going to get married and start having kids?' And the truth is I had no idea how I would balance the expected role of wife and mother with a challenging career.

My mother's love has always been a sustaining force for our family, and one of my greatest joys is seeing her integrity, her compassion, her intelligence reflected in my daughters.

The issues a president faces are not black and white, and cannot be boiled down into 140 characters. Because when you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military at your command, you can't make snap decisions. You can't have a thin skin or the tendency to lash out.

With everything in my life, I don't think too much ahead.

Mr. Koons's work has always inspired architects, which I think is very interesting. I think he is an artist who has reinvented himself so many times and reinvented so many different series.

I was in the Pritikin Center in Santa Monica once, trying to lose 30 or 40 pounds in a month. I'd work... on a treadmill and with the weights, but it was driving me nuts. So I escaped. Tom Arnold picked me up and we went to Le Dome and had tons of desserts.

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.