I just have a thing for writers. Maybe it because I'm just so not a writer.

But I have had the luxury of working on good films with great people.

I love writers. All of my best friends are writers.

If my gravy train stops at SAG, honey, it's been a great ride.

But no, had I been successful in my 20s I would have been just fine. But it is nice to defy the odds.

I'll read a script maybe twice, but I'll think about the role more than I'll rehearse lines.

The odds are not in your favor the older you get, especially if you're a woman in this business.

And I have a really great agent and I know it's almost an oxymoron to say you have a smart agent. But she is and she has a beautiful aesthetic and she has guided me.

I'm still traumatized that I'm going to be on a big screen in a white bikini and naked so who knows!

It's never easy with characters in these dark and grave circumstances but that's my job.

I don't like a lot of rehearsing.

New Orleans. Born and raised. I lived there until I was 19.

I'm obsessed. I've always needed to know what's going on but now it's a must.

And now oddly I'm getting sexier parts than I've ever gotten.

Holly Hunter has been doing great work forever.

Well did graduate summa cum laude from Fordham University.

See, the SAG awards caught me totally by surprise.

You're always close and you never get that big romantic lead.

I think it kind of took being a character actor to kind of now enter into leading ladies.

The majority of work I do is in independent films, where you're lucky if you have five takes.

I'm really a director's actor. I rely heavily on a director.

I think it would be hard to go the distance in this business without a sense of humor.

I always try to approach character first and foremost viscerally.

I think it's always harder in a film to convey intimacy.

Why are comedic parts for women the exception, not the rule?

I just have a thing for writers. Maybe it because I'm just so not a writer.

I have to watch the news or my day is not complete.

Arnold Bennett was a writer I admired. He was actually taking notes at his father's deathbed.

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.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.

A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.

It's essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied.

I was never really a writer, I was always more of a performer.

Without books I would not have become a vivacious reader, and if you are not a reader you are not a writer.

Well see, I'm a good enough writer that not everybody in my books talks exactly like I do.

So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.

Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

You know, Mamet is not a huge writer of female parts. Most of his movies don't even have women in them, so I'm lucky I'm in it at all.

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.

In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.