Cobie Smulders

You make your first album, you make some money, and you feel like you still have to show face, like 'I still go to the projects.' I'm like, why? Your job is to inspire people from your neighborhood to get out. You grew up there. What makes you think it's so cool?

You couldn't get me to go travel around and sit in a hotel room again. I have no interest in doing that. So everybody's happy. I am, at 74. Some people like doing it, but I never was much for that, anyway. It's a lot of work. So the only thing I miss about all of it is the camaraderie of the tour, but that doesn't offset the rest of it.

If I'm serious, yes, I'd like to have done what Shakespeare did... to act and write. You learn so much from acting. One of our great writers, Alan Bennett, does both supremely well. When I write a story, I tend to speak it aloud as I'm writing it.