Growing up, I wanted desperately to please, to be a good girl.

But I don't know if people are meant to be together. You have to have a lot in common, choose well and be really fortunate. It's not like you're sprinkled with fairy dust. You have to believe that love will be there when you need it.

I hadn't been free from adult responsibilities since I was 12, and I needed to experience that. I really needed to just be a kid again.

Fame doesn't end loneliness.

I get a little jealous of these actor boys. They walk into a club, and in two seconds flat there are swarms of girls who are wanting so badly to touch them or just say hello. That's not the case with me, or any other girl I know.

I would sign on for projects that were meant to shoot in July, and then they would postponed and they would bleed into the following semester, and then I'd take a semester off, and then the movie would collapse.

However, I'm at a very comfortable place in my career and celebrity, in that I don't have to audition as extensively as I used to for roles but yet I'm not immediately recognizable.

My character was kidnapped by the Terminator and I was kidnapped by the Terminator production.

Maybe philosophy - I love talking about ideas. Or maybe art history. I was thinking about psychology, then I got really afraid because everybody says it's terribly boring.

You don't realize how useful a therapist is until you see yourself on e and discover you have more problems than you ever dreamed of.

I'm only realizing now that I was a child actress because I always took myself so seriously.

Acting is the greatest answer to my loneliness that I have found.

I know, it's true. I've played these tortured teenagers. I can't wait to shed that image.

There's certainly something very uncomfortable about the voyeurism involved in being in the press, being an actor, where people have a seemingly insatiable curiosity about, you.

I really liked Yale, although it was extremely intimidating. When I visited the campus, I was hiding behind trees, I felt so unworthy.

You know, let a few years go by until I hit my midlife crisis. Then that can be documented on film.

Growing up, I wanted desperately to please, to be a good girl.

I think because I am as earnest as I am, people were accepting of my evolving into a certified, legitimate, and grown up and I did take three years off.

I have a huge, active imagination, and I think I'm really scared of being alone; because if I'm left to my own devices, I'll just turn into a madwoman.

I became very successful at a young age... I had lots of opportunities and lots of power and had no idea how to focus it.

I have this home in New York, I have a long-term relationship with my boyfriend, who's from Australia, and I had this business that I had maintain. Even though I wasn't actively shooting, there's a lot of peripheral work.

I finally realized that yeah I did want to be an actor and it wasn't out of habit, but I needed to grow up for myself and then kind of re-enter the industry with a sound understanding of what my sensibilities and my values are as a relatively formed human being.

I took three years off. I differentiated myself from the industry. Found my identity - sort of... I haven't graduated yet. I'm not legitimately educated yet, but maybe one day.

What I needed was a connection to life that was real and lasting.

Yeah, there was the Flora Plum thing, where I trained for about a month and I had taken a semester off for that, and two weeks prior to filming, the financing collapsed.

When I was 18 I went to college for two years and didn't work for a year which was essential for me, because my identity had been so influenced by my being an actor and I think I just needed to discover what it was to be myself, divorced from all that responsibility.

Acting is a humiliating job, from start to finish.

Actors want to surprise themselves. When it's really good, you kind of transcend yourself, and that happens infrequently. Very, very rarely.

Any story is better with a little love in it, right?

As a young performer, I didn't know that you can have a great time playing someone in terrible crisis. The more you know it's not real, the deeper you can go into it. And the easier it is to let it go when it's done.

Autism does exist on a spectrum, and there are so many manifestations of it, so many kinds of expressions of it. And every case is particular.

By the time I went to Yale, I'd been acting for a long time and I was really tired of it. I was restless - and a little bored - and I was really eager to investigate different parts of myself.

College was just so essential for my sense of self and my development.

Counterterrorism isn't really about the nunchakus, the guns and gadgets. It's about psychology.

Every three seconds in the developing world, a child dies needlessly due to lack of basic health care and other things we all take for granted.

Every time I make a movie, I'm prepared for it to become influential and career-defining - but I have no control over these things.

Growing up in New York City, I was always encouraged to question authority, and I think I confused patriotism with jingoism.

Growing up in New York with artist parents - a very liberal environment, where we were always encouraged to challenge the status quo - I think for a long time I confused jingoism with patriotism. And that is a mistake.

I actually haven't been approached a whole lot for television, believe it or not.

I actually think in some ways that it might be more challenging to be bipolar because it's so mercurial - it's so ever-changing. You can't get any traction. You can't build on a system. Whereas, somebody who has Asperger's, which is certainly a much more forgiving expression of autism, can create models for coping and build on them over time.

I am not a genius. But I am nerdy.

I can get a dance party started pretty much anywhere and anytime.

I could truly have gone through life thinking that women were these venomous creatures. Turns out, they're not.

I discovered Christopher Isherwood in college. His writing style is so direct, warm, and inclusive.

I discovered Orson Welles in college; my freshman English professor screened 'Citizen Kane' for us, and I wound up writing a 20-page term paper on it.

I do know how to fire a machine gun, so be warned! I'm trained!

I don't know any celebrated people that register in a big way who aren't unique.

I fantasized about being a psychology major when I first started school, and I took a handful of Psych 101 classes.

I got an agent when I was 12, and I started working in more amateur productions well before that. But even as a kid, I never felt like a kid actor, you know? I always took myself kind of absurdly seriously.