Making a living out of acting sounded like science-fiction when I was growing up. I didn't know anyone around me who lived from anything related to art.

The discipline that ballet requires is obsessive. And only the ones who dedicate their whole lives are able to make it. Your toenails fall off and you peel them away and then you're asked to dance again and keep smiling. I wanted to become a professional ballet dancer.

I never want to lie about my age. If I look around at the actresses I admire, they are all women who have not fought growing older, but embraced it and been proud of it - women like Sophia Loren or Audrey Hepburn.

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 love my career. I thought, if I was lucky, I would retire as a senior intelligence officer, still working on the issues of counterproliferation. But that didn't happen, so - new chapter.

When I go in, I find that it is not a lab but an office. There are a pile of letters to answer, phone numbers to call up, people waiting to have an interview, routine work that must be done.

All I can do is do my part and keep trying to open up eyes with what I did on the football field, what I did in my career. Just go out there and try to compete and shock a couple more people.

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.