It's the relationships between people that are more important than the sort of far away fantasies of what the good life is, the world of supermodels and Bud ads.

I take the responsibility of choosing seriously because it becomes an indelible part of your body of work. Something has to sing to me.

When I was 5, my mother threw a party, and a friend and I wrote and performed a play called The Dutch Doll.

There are all kinds of other things I could do, things I would probably like, but only acting would give me emotional fulfillment.

I was offered one of the roles in a big project that shall remain nameless. I thought the whole thing encouraged violent sex crimes toward women. It made horrible, ghastly rape violence seem sexy. I just didn't want to sign my name to it.

My major in college was Chinese Studies. It was very intentional.

I had started off, before I ever got an acting job, working at Robert De Niro's Tribeca Productions as a reader. I was always interested in that side of the camera.

Acting is doing, because everything you say or do is some kind of an action, some kind of a verb. You're always connected to the other person through some kind of action.

The Oscars have become such a big deal these days that it's just used as adjective.

I assume that if people get to know me, they'll like me. If they don't, it's not my problem.

Once you've found something you know how to do, it makes you feel you don't have to be intimidated by someone.

It's the relationships between people that are more important than the sort of far away fantasies of what the good life is, the world of supermodels and Bud ads.

The name game is frustrating. Agents will say, They love you, but they're going to offer it to Julia Roberts first.

I had been looking for a New York apartment, but I said, Why not give LA a go?

We all struggle with our failure to communicate and our failure to reach beyond fear to love people.

I have learned to pare down what I do and still be effective and strong in a role.

I could have seen myself going into academia, but I don't love it; I just like it.

I hope that doing truthful portrayals of people in a variety of circumstances gives people a kind of subterranean link to those characters.

My father taught me how to substitute realities.

Being is like pretending.

I'll talk to myself out loud a lot.

I had a Christian upbringing - it was all about sin and guilt. I was very happy just kissing people. I was like the make-out queen - not even second base.

I wanted to do something far from my intellectual and physical home, so I went to live in Beijing for eight months and took Mandarin Chinese.

I want my life to effect the balance to the positive.

Sometimes I feel limited by people's perceptions of what I can and cannot do, or what I do or don't look like.

I have a hard time getting motivated to do something that seems like a career move. I've gotten into vague trouble with my agents for turning down work that I thought was exploitative.

I hate it when people use sex as a weapon against the people who are engaging in it. It's so hypocritical.

There was something about being in front of audiences when I was in elementary school plays that gave me a thrill. It was like the rush you get from a roller coaster drop.

Now that I've got some films under my belt, I have the courage of my convictions regarding acting. It gives me a leg to stand on.

I try to become more humble and more myself with every year. There was a while when I got famous where I was so confused and my head was spinning.

I'm doing things that are more artistic again, more close to the material that I love. I don't disparage those things that I did. They're just not as much reflective of who I am.

I always feel I can play a role - just give me the time to do the preparation and I'll be it.

Acting is what happens on the way.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.