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

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.

I say, do not mess with Oprah. The one person in America you shouldn't mess with.

I was completely unprepared for the public spectacle my private life became, and didn't like it a bit.

I can ski backwards on one ski. And foldblinded!

Turkey is not an enemy of Israel. I have worked closely with the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

If we had picked Manziel, he'd guarantee our relevance for 10 years.

I really appreciate comedy a lot.

When people tell you to walk a certain way, it's like not thinking of a purple tomato. You can't not do it.

Depression has existed as long as mankind itself, and certainly well before psychiatry, antidepressant medication, or the nation of America itself came into being.

When I was on that boat, I realized the only way I would feel creatively challenged was if I totally changed everything about my environment and put myself in a storm, in a sense.

Speaking purely from a musical standpoint, I think I am a great performer.

A society that has made 'nostalgia' a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.

I enjoyed playing someone who is a professional, intelligent, defined by her work and not her role as a wife or mother.

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit what I shall soon cease to be - a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others and intolerable to myself.

All of our competitors around the world, every country is investing more in infrastructure as a percentage of their GDP than we are. And down the road our children and grandchildren will have to compete with that more and more.

A baseball manager is a necessary evil.

Sundays in France have a different atmosphere to other days, with fewer phone calls, no postman, no delivery men and no one banging on the door.

The theory of isolation of certain tasks in certain hemispheres of the brain suggests I shouldn't even be able to speak, never mind write.

My parents immigrated from Italy and spent 40 days and 40 stinking nights on a boat so we didn't have to eat things like gizzards.

A leader is admired, a boss is feared.

There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.

Juggling is a conversation with the stick, the body, the brain.