I was raised in Boston by three older brothers and a very strong and empowering single mom.

I'm a more mature actress now.

If I wasn't doing this, I'd be in school studying political science or socioeconomic something. I love visiting different cultures and finding out how they make up a society.

My parents divorced when I was born, and my mother is a political science professor, like a feminist Mormon, which is sort of an oxymoron.

Go big or go home. Because it's true. What do you have to lose?

I'm self-confident and not afraid to speak my mind.

When I worked with Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies, she told me, You need a plan B, because when you have six months to a year off, you can go nuts. You need to have another focus.

In my first movie, That Night, with Juliette Lewis, I had a scene with two other girls where we applied a cream to our chests to make our breasts grow. I was 10.

TV can be a long commitment.

There is definitely something sexy about a girl with an attitude and a pair of leather pants.

The letters from jail are always disconcerting.

We didn't have a TV in the living room and all my friends thought we were kind of weird. When they'd come over, my mom wanted to talk to them about current events.

When you get to your mid-20s, you start to feel responsibilities for the things that you do and the people around you. It's a cool age.

My mom is this liberal, feminist, Mormon powerhouse. I just love her to death.

I don't care who you are, everyone has been through it - that feeling where you'd like to be someone else.

I remember hitting Sarah Michelle Gellar with a right hook during my first week on the job. It was awful. They usually pair actors with stunt doubles to avoid things like that.

My mother would take groups of students to different countries and always brought us along, so by the time I was 10, I had been to Russia, China, Nicaragua and several other countries.

I was raised in Boston by three older brothers and a very strong and empowering single mom.

For the longest time, I thought I was a boy. I really did. I wore boys' clothes, played tag football.

I don't let guys do hickeys. That's like a dog marking his territory or something.

It's easy to play a bad girl: You just do everything you've been told not to do, and you don't have to deal with the consequences, because it's only acting.

Each year, I say I'm going to go to school next year. It's inevitable that I'll end up getting my education.

Growing up I was as big a tomboy as you can get.

I have nieces and nephews that I love hanging out with, and they think I'm the biggest goof on the planet.

I wake up and play a different person every day. Playing all these different characters and trying to figure out who your true authentic self is at the core of that as you're playing all these different roles, and man, that self-awareness starts to come into effect. And you start to see who you really are.

There are a lot of actresses out there who are the girl next door. I relate more to characters who have an edge.

When I worked with Jamie Lee Curtis in 'True Lies', she told me, You need a plan B, because when you have six months to a year off, you can go nuts. You need to have another focus.

You know, I really am probably one of the sweetest, most sensitive people you'll ever meet.

There was a time when I was wondering about this business of going public, so I visited about a half-dozen companies in the Boston area, all of them formed by MIT faculty and all had gone public.

Was the crew well? Was I not? I had profited in many ways by the voyage. I had even gained flesh, and actually weighed a pound more than when I sailed from Boston.

Our situation here, without any exaggeration, is beyond description almost; it is such as eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it ever entered into the heart of men to conceive Boston ever to arrive at.

A very considerable body of the German people live in America and propose to fight that Government. Bourke in his great speech last week welcoming the Belgian mission to Boston worked out the President's meaning with care.

At a Boston signing, someone from the audience asked why I was so obsessed with furniture in my books. The question rattled around in my head. I had no idea that I was obsessed with furniture.

My father was the orphaned son of immigrants to the United States from Ireland. My father never knew his parents. His mother died - we're not sure - either at or shortly after his birth, and he and all of his siblings were placed in orphanages in the Boston area.

Boston is the engine of the state's economy.

And it was from Boston that one in every six American families began their journey into the land of the free.

I don't believe a manager ever won a pennant. Casey Stengel won all those pennants with the Yankees. How many did he win with the Boston Braves and Mets?

There isn't much discussion of ruling class in America even in Boston, probably one of the most class-conscious cities in the country?

In my freshman year in high school, I went to the only public high school in Boston with a theatre program.

The word survivor suggests someone who has emerged alive from a plane crash or a natural disaster. But the word can also refer to the loved ones of murder victims, and this was the sense in which it was used at a four-day conference in early June at Boston College.

Probably the biggest thing that surprises people is that I am obsessed with hockey. I grew up in the Boston area so I am obsessed with hockey since I was a little kid.

When I go abroad I always sail from Boston because it is such a pleasant place to get away from.

I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

Here's what I see all across this great city - people working together to make Boston a better place to live and to raise children, to grow and pursue dreams.

Paul Farmer has helped to build amazing health care system in one of the poorest areas of Haiti. He founded Partners in Health, which serves the destitute and the sick in many parts of the world from Haiti to Boston and from Russia to Peru.

I recently did a piece for the Boston Pops and John Williams, and I hope that it's as well a composed piece as I've ever done for any other medium or occasion.

If you're writing a piece for the Boston Pops, the balance is towards one end. If you're writing a piece for a chamber music society, then it's towards another point. I won't make a final answer on that. I think it changes with every piece.

Let's use the energy of this historic year to propel us toward our shared vision of a greater Boston.

I got private lessons in keyboard at Julliard, before New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.