The director took my face in his hands and asked me to show him my teeth, as with a horse. This happened on a Wednesday, and by the following Monday I was shooting.

When I said I was going to audition for a film, I got a hearty laugh from all my family.

Acting is the work of two people-it's only possible when you have the complicity, the help, even the manipulation of a director.

On my fifth film, it was then that I stopped dancing.

My only friends were boys, and I was just one more of them.

I had to gain weight until I looked like a seal so I could compete with the real whores who played the other roles. I was fat as a barrel.

For most of my career, I've played roles that were written for other actresses.

My first vocation was dance.

I'm a small and normal girl, and stories like mine no one likes to tell. Fortunately so, because I wouldn't like to play myself.

The film kept me from working as a secretary. It was a real stroke of luck. A miracle.

I went to dance classes from 9 in the morning until 1, then to school from 3 to 10 at night, always under the threat that if I failed a single course I could forget about dancing.

People love coming on television, even if they have to show their miseries.

Keep your ears open, your eyes open, grab everything you can, react, and learn!

When you have to get into the character each morning, give it your voice, your face, it was torture.

The director had come to Madrid to court me.

There's nothing more human than two people making love.

You can fake your age or mask it, but the passion that moves the characters has to be real.

The actress they'd hired had refused to appear naked in front of the camera. I didn't like to appear naked either, but the first thing I did was take off my clothes and jump into the pool completely naked.

My current companion, Gerard de Battista, is the father of my two sons.

I'd heard it was dangerous to walk around Miami.

I chose the most explosive dress I could find. I put a ton of makeup on and some great round earrings. I looked like Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun.

I really wanted to work and become independent.

I like men with some belly who are a little over the hill.

Compared to dancing, films seemed to me to be the work of lay bums. There was no physical pain; it was enough to say and imagine what was in the script. It was very easy for me.

Psychiatrists don't solve anything from one day to the next.

The director took my face in his hands and asked me to show him my teeth, as with a horse. This happened on a Wednesday, and by the following Monday I was shooting.

Acting is the work of two people - it's only possible when you have the complicity, the help, even the manipulation of a director.

I didn't go to school a lot.

My father, who was jailed for stealing on more than one occasion, just abandoned his fatherly responsibilities and disappeared. I grew up working from the time I was nine years of age. Money was a big issue everywhere I lived.

Happiness An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.

The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it.

I was an infantry Marine, and there are only so many things you can do when you get out of the military that you can apply your job to. Either a janitor or a cop. I tried to do both of those things because what else are you going to do?

I am not altogether confident of my ability to put my thoughts into words: My texts are usually better after an editor has hacked away at them, and I am used to both editing and being edited. Which is to say that I am not oversensitive in such matters.

The first time I can remember thinking that I would like to be a writer came in sixth grade, when our teacher Mrs. Crandall gave us an extended period of time to write a long story. I loved doing it. I started working seriously at becoming a writer when I was seventeen.

There is obviously a power and a truth in action that doesn't lie, which words easily can do.

The sacred, I shall say, is that which acts as your partner in the search for the highest and deepest things: the real, the true, the good, and the beautiful. The name I'd like to give to the kind of relationship that gives us a chance to find such things is a 'circle of meaning.'

After that I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face, stripped by death of that earthly patina which masks the living soul. And I would ask, who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you now?

Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.

We eat, therefore we hunt.

People deserve to see a governor who is hustling every day.

If torture is going to be administered as a last resort in the ticking-bomb case, to save enormous numbers of lives, it ought to be done openly, with accountability, with approval by the president of the United States or by a Supreme Court justice.

I never read 'The Cinderella Complex' - I'm too afraid that my name might be in it.

It's a very good time for horror. This business certainly has changed, but there's still room for serious horror films. Look at 28 Days Later, that's not a tongue-in-cheek picture.

Human life is inherently creative. Its why we all have different resumes. Its why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic.

For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

In my own life I know that my state of cheerfulness is a reliable gauge of my level of spiritual enlightenment at that moment. The more cheerful, happy, contented, and satisfied I am feeling, the more aware I am of my deep connection to Spirit.

Let all the learned say what they can, 'Tis ready money makes the man.

What's blessed about my life is that I have been able to connect with the global audience on a regular basis. I am thankful for everybody's love, and I reciprocate that, but I also have to deliver on every occasion.

Building new nuclear is something that is going to take a lot of commitment, not only from our company but from the communities we serve. It is a five-to-seven-year journey to build one, and they are expensive.