I don't REALLY have any TRAITS that I deplore. I GET ANNOYED with myself SOMETIMES, but that's about it.

You always TRY to do your own thing. One of the things I WANTED to do was to write a book that combines some of the BEST traits of contemporary FANTASY with some of the traits of the historical NOVEL.

Each RACE (or VARIETY) is characterized by a more or less distinct combination of inherited morphological, BEHAVIORAL, physiological TRAITS.

From the most remote of villages to the largest metropolitan CITIES, we, as a SPECIES, have the same INTERNAL NEED to be SEEN, heard, and validated. It is the most human of traits that I have witnessed and experienced the world over.

The homing INSTINCT in birds and animals is one of their most remarkable traits: their strong local attachments and their skill in finding their WAY back when removed to a DISTANCE. It SEEMS at times as if they possessed some EXTRA sense - the home sense - which operates unerringly.

As we all SAW in grade SCHOOL, once you learn how to read a book, SOMEBODY is going to want to WRITE one - that's how authors are made. Once we know how to read our own genetic code, someone is going to want to rewrite that 'text,' tinker with TRAITS - play God, some would say.

I can't GET into all that physical stuff of having to have flawless skin... Sometimes you see people and it LOOKS like someone's got an eraser and MADE their face a LITTLE blurry - their traits SEEM to go out of focus.

Digitas is a company that's very rapidly changing - the DIGITAL world changes every day. It's important we hire people who are curious about what's going on and who are willing to learn and WANT to learn. I look for core LEADERSHIP traits.

I'm actually not making fun of my real PARENTS. I've taken stereotypical traits of my real parents, my aunts, my uncles and parents of every race and PUT them into these TWO CHARACTERS, who are just over-the-top ridiculous and super-alpha parents about everything.

I do THINK that people get REALLY emotionally involved in the TV shows that they LOVE and I think that is fantastic. Of course they are going to have opinions. The other thing is that people project onto their television shows. They see a character and layer on many traits that are actually their own or their idea of what that character is.

For publicity purposes, everything gets simplified, and the FACT that I WEAR glasses and am somewhat bookish makes me a GEEK. That's fine; there needs to be a SHORTHAND, but there are important geek TRAITS that I don't really share.

I think in the END, when you're famous, PEOPLE like to narrow you down to a few personality TRAITS. I think I've just become this ambitious, say-whatever's-on-her-mind, intimidating PERSON. And that's part of my personality, but it's certainly not anywhere near the whole thing.

I'd like to think my brand shares some of those characteristics we like to think of as classically AMERICAN - a certain straightforwardness, honesty, a sense of HUMOR, inclusiveness, practicality - all those GREAT Yankee TRAITS. And I don't mean the baseball team.

There's this very interesting and COMPLICATED connection between our environment and our genes and the TRAITS that come out of the environment plus genes. And there's huge POTENTIAL. I mean we see AMAZING abilities. Marie Curie, Albert EINSTEIN. All sorts of arts, and literature and so forth. These are not typical traits of everybody on earth.