I make personal appearances around the country. I'm starting a book tour now, and I may be coming to Toronto with the Learning Annex, which I'm doing all through the United States, so that may come up just before Christmas.

I hate feeling full, so Christmas is about the only time I really stuff myself.

The best Christmas present I got from my husband was a week to do whatever I wanted.

My parents' long and happy marriage was a great ideal to live up to, but a tough one.

I grew up with three little brothers. Every Christmas, we'd have piles of toy trucks and Lincoln Logs and G.I. Joes under the tree. Those were for them. For me? My No. 1 favorite present of all time: books. Two or three tall stacks of wonderful stories that I could lose myself in for weeks.

For Christmas 1999, my husband surprised me with a trip to Disney World. Along with our boys, we were standing on the roof of the Contemporary Hotel at midnight on New Year's Eve 2000 watching fireworks explode over every amusement park in Orlando. It was a magical way to celebrate the millennial, and a never-to-be-forgotten Christmas present.

The year I turned 16, I spent the weeks before Christmas dropping hints to my parents about how much I wanted - no, needed - my own transportation.

I didn't feel the need to rebel as a teenager. From age nine to 16, I went to school in Montreux in Switzerland, and it was heaven. I went to England for the Easter holidays, Cyprus for Christmas and summer holidays, and I was delighted to have that independence.

My daughter Stacia was born when I was 31, after I was divorced from David, and she was my gift to myself. She was just a joy because I didn't have the stress of a male irritating me, and I vowed that I would make absolutely certain that between her and me there would be a clear line of communication at all times.

My first publication was a haiku in a children's magazine when I was 9 years old. I received one dollar for it! I gave the check to my dad for Christmas, and he framed it and hung it over his desk.

In our racist, sexist society, Christmas is the 8 hours when we stop killing each other and gratutious over eating is encouraged so that the starving and other people in the world can die!

In our racist, sexist society, Christmas is the eight hours when we stop killing each other and gratuitous overeating is encouraged so that the starving and other people in the world can die!

The thing I find about the movie industry is that 99 percent of the people are absolute scum. They're horrible people, they really are. Very nasty killer rabbits who hate movies. But the other 1 percent are really the greatest, most wonderful people in the world.

Even though we're a week and a half away from Thanksgiving, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

The truth is that our way of celebrating the Christmas season does spring from myriad cultures and sources, from St. Nicholas to Coca-Cola advertising campaigns.

Whether it's viewers of the show or readers of my columns and books, I'm consistently impressed with their wit, humor and insight. That goes for about 95 percent of the audience. The other five percent are why the 'Delete' option and restraining orders were invented.

Like the Earth, the Web is a less appealing place than it used to be. If I want attitude and arguing and meanness and profanity and wrong information screamed at me as gospel, I'll get in a time machine and spend Christmas with my family in 1977.

The greatest players use anger as fuel. Michael Jordan played every night with something like road rage.

One of my favorite traditions is that my sisters and I, we all wear the same pajamas. I've even still got some from when I was 6. Also, I'll always remember cooking together in the kitchen and that no matter how busy our schedules are, we are all together for Christmas.

I do enjoy doing pantomime at Christmas. If I didn't do it, I'd feel as though I was missing something.

Without social networks, you're not the coolest thing on the Christmas list, and you're not getting any bite.

It's hard and sometimes it's scary. It still amazes my mother. I went home for Christmas one year and there were fans all over the front lawn, hoping to see me.

Why doesn't Apple stop for a year and make medical devices? When people talk about technology, that's where I start to get a little hot under the collar because I know that it's the key to solving some of the world's biggest problems. Having a faster, thinner telephone is not one of the world's biggest problems.

Lately I did a film called All I Want for Christmas and it was well received. This gave me a new point of view and a new respect for my work as an actress.

A typical Christmas is me shucking oysters. I love them and I always get them in at Christmas.

I have to confess that I've never been a great fan of Christmas or, as it's known in our house, The Monster That Ate the Last Third of the Year. It's mostly the rampant consumerism I object to, but I'm also a little wary of the annual crop of new Christmas stories and sometimes wonder why anyone bothers.

I don't usually like teen novels written in the present tense, particularly those told from a first-person viewpoint. Too many writers seem to believe that using either or both devices automatically imbues their stories with deep seriousness and a contemporary feel.

Being a writer in Iceland, you get rewarded all the time: People really do read our books, and they have opinions; they love them, or they hate them. At the average Christmas party, people push politics and the Kardashians aside and discuss literature.

Everything is very expensive in Iceland, so I got some things done in India in the two months I was here. I visited the dentist, the optician, the tailor. When I go home, I'll have a new smile, a new wardrobe, and spectacles.

I would like to go back and spend a Christmas with my family and myself when I was five years old and just see what that dynamic would be like. Observe it. I think it would be a magical gift.

You always get things that teach you and steps to grow, but there is a confidence that is gained and a deep understanding of what it means to be supported by your knowledge - not by some team that is there to create confidence; it is there within you. That takes time. That takes teachers. That takes taking risks.

I actually share her view and understand her frustration when any government attempts to ban secular symbols like Santa Claus or Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer or Christmas lights.

As you know, Social Security functions under the premise that today's workers will help finance benefits for retirees and that these workers will then be supported by the next generation of workers paying into the same system.

On Christmas, my family and I see a movie and go out for Chinese food. We don't celebrate Christmas in the traditional sense, in that we do not actually celebrate Christmas.

Coming from Chicago, I like a white Christmas.

I was so emotional. Choked up. I could hardly talk all day. I'll be cleaning out my trailer and saying goodbye soon, realizing what a wonderful experience this has been.

If you pray enough for things, I am proof that they can happen. I feel like a kid on Christmas day now, every day. It's something I have wanted for a long time and I am as happy as anyone to be here. It is great to be back at my first love.

So when I was 13, I basically left home and never returned and lived at home again. I would come home for a week at Christmas and two weeks in the summer only.

At the end of four years' time, at graduation, we were down to 12. At our reunion that we had several years ago, only 1 out of the 52 actually made it to ordination and priesthood. So there you go, there's your numbers.

One of my favorite movies of all time is 'It's A Wonderful Life,' which is a pretty interesting choice for a seasonal Christmas favorite, because it's about a guy who wants to commit suicide and is presented with reasons not to.

If you're an English actor, and you're asked to do an episode - especially the Christmas episode - of 'Downton Abbey,' you can't turn it down. It's like, 'Of course!'

I just want that sensation you have in dreams when you fly to be real.

I started with the Target Company in 1993 when their Christmas theme that year was 'It's A Wonderful Life,' and they reunited the actors who played the Bailey kids. So we went all over and really had a blast getting the love from all of the fans and thought, 'Whoopty-doo, there's something going on here.'

In all, I was in 16 movies, including 'The Bishop's Wife' with Cary Grant, Loretta Young and David Niven; I was in 'Rio Grande' with John Wayne, 'Albuquerque' with Randall Scott, 'Blue Skies' with Bing Crosby and 'Hans Christian Anderson' with Danny Kaye.

With a lot of help from my high school teachers, I went to college and became a medical tech at a clinic outside Kansas City.

People say I don't write books, I make Christmas presents.

Beauty of expression is so akin to the voice of the sea.

There are high spots in all of our lives and most of them have come about through encouragement from someone else. I don't care how great, how famous or successful a man or woman may be, each hungers for applause.

It is easier to win than to fail. Everybody sides with the winner. But the failure walks alone.

A cheerful frame of mind, reinforced by relaxation... is the medicine that puts all ghosts of fear on the run.