Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've been accused of being pretentious and insufferable, and I don't really know what I can say about that. I never got good grades in school, but I did read the dictionary for fun. That was just the kind of stuff that I liked to do. I can't apologize for that.
I'm not going back to acting class, although I've thought of it. The classic training that people get usually when they start out, I never had, and I always felt and still feel the lack of it, so there's a lot of basic stuff that I just don't have a clue about.
We have to support each other's tired nerves, I know that sounds so Pollyanna, but really... Mommy groups can be amazing, but haven't you ever gone to one and felt like you are back in high school, totally on the outside of the 'cool kids' club? I totally have!
Any addict in recovery would say that life never becomes perfect. Your life is better, but that doesn't mean it's easier. Life, at least for a certain period of time, becomes harder and you have to work through that to get to the light at the end of the tunnel.
When I was out of work when I first moved to L.A., one of the first things my husband and I did was buy season's passes to Disney, and whenever I was bummed out about work, we would go to Space Mountain, and it was like a physical injection of anti-depressants.
My anger made me drink as an escape from reality, a way of forgetting. But you don't know when the medicinal effect ends and the poisoning begins ... This is my sixth year of sobriety. Overcoming alcoholism has been my greatest challenge and my greatest reward.
I think it's important to be able to say that you did live a normal life and struggled to make ends meet. It all has to do with work ethic and how I apply myself to my awesome job now. I've always been used to working because I've been working since I was four.
The media was always so focused on the money a movie makes. But I was in Times Square, and a bunch of Japanese tourists looked at me and started shouting, 'Toula!' I loved it. It's these tiny moments of connection that register with me the most and always have.
If I'm on my own, I'll speak to 'Monkey' to generate new stuff for the act. I mean, I don't do it for moral support, although I wouldn't say that's out of the question. In fact, I could do it, I might do it... yes, I think I should actually start doing it more.
I remember, when I was a little kid playing with the 25 Legos I had, I thought, 'If I just had a camera, I could film different setups and make it look like I have way more Legos and tell a story.' I didn't get a camera, though, until I basically got an iPhone.
I want Barack Obama for president. I love Obama. I call Palin the helicopter huntress from hell! I want my children to have a wonderful future, and it's disturbing when I look around. Americans aren't very well-liked. A likable president would be a great start.
There's a lot of work that goes into it - if you think about how many collections a year that Karl Lagerfeld has to do, with Chanel and all the other things he does - you can't do that unless you are working 18 hours a day. It's really a lot of hard, hard work.
I think we felt the pressure more at first than this time around. But still you don't want to let anyone down. I never even met Patrick until we had a Christmas party at Ian McKellen's house on the first movie and then I didn't see him again until the premiere.
There are the jobs you get that do something for your confidence, like, 'I can do this with my life' kind of thing. And then, there are the jobs that maybe bring a certain level of awareness about you as an actor, where other people feel like they can hire you.
Youve got all these books on self help, getting to know yourself, doing the right thing, eating the so-called right foods, even down to what books you have on your shelves. People are encouraged to look to themselves first as opposed to being a part of society.
It's the people who are more insecure who feel the need to control and micromanage. But that's true of any profession and hierarchy with a boss. You have people who know you are competent enough to do your job, and then you have the ones that just hover around.
I do think that people have a desire to talk about issues they may have wanted to avoid before. I've never had so many random conversations with people where they're so ready to talk about race, gender, sexual identity, or things that are happening in politics.
When you spend a lot of time, like I do, just standing around and waiting, or being moved from place to place, every minute gets consumed by something someone else has set up for you. And it's not like I'm always in a beautiful place wearing something gorgeous.
I've very emotional. When I went through my first breakup, I thought it was the end of the world, and I thought I was going to die if I didn't have him in my life. It was good to cry it out, and just scream, or call my friends in the middle of the night crying.
I have no idea what my draw is for science fiction. I hope they come to me because they like complicated women. But I've never played the Bionic Woman. In 'Sarah Connor' and 'Lost,' I am not the orchestrator of what happens. I've played quite peripheral people.
There's a definition of narcissism that when a parent is narcissistic, instead of the child seeing himself reflected in the mother's face and the mother's joy, the child of the narcissistic parent feels like, 'What can I do to make her okay, to make her happy?'
My mom's a translator, my dad's a woodworker; that's the world I grew up in, that's the world I'm most comfortable in. The whole idea of Hollywood or any of that other stuff that unfortunately goes along with film, that wasn't part of my upbringing, thankfully.
'Orphan Black' allows for people to have debates and theories and allegiances to different characters; to trust characters and hate other characters, but it doesn't tell you who is good or bad or right or wrong. That's the most exciting storytelling in my book.
Oh, I definitely want to direct. I have young children. My job is already big enough, and I imagine it will be even more so as a director, and I don't want to miss out on them growing up. I'm going to wait until they're a bit older before I leap into that seat.
With friends, if you keep making an effort to reach out and you keep getting hurt, you eventually stop trying. But it's much harder to give up on family. Somewhere deep down you want it to work so badly that you keep making the same mistake over and over again.
For so many years, I was trying to beat my hair into submission, trying to get it to look like someone else's hair, and I didn't know how. I remember going through a phase where I even put beer in my hair, because I was told that would make it smooth and curly.
My husband [Julius Tennon] and I started a production company. We've already optioned a book and some scripts to do exactly that, to create more complicated, multi-faceted roles for African-Americans, especially African-American females. I think it's important.
I had several teachers who inspired me, in both the public school system and the Upward Bound program. I needed several, because I lived in such abject poverty and dysfunction. And they're still in my life today, because I consider them to be friends, actually.
I've witnessed racism all my life. And of course there's racism and discrimination in Hollywood. You go for a part and they say, 'Oh, we really liked her, she's amazing, but we wanted to go with something more traditional'. As if I'm not a traditional American!
I'm not a great student, so I don't know that I would have been a great detective. Part of my brain sort of works that way, like wanting to figure out puzzles and figure out what happened and why people do the things they do and who they are and how it happened.
I don't want to be Marilyn Monroe. In many ways, that's a good comparison. Because Marilyn Monroe was a sexpot, all that stuff that I have no interest in. For me, it's much easier to just try to make people laugh than to try to be the hottest thing in the world.
If somebody would've told me that I was going to lose my legs at the age of 19, I would've thought there's absolutely no way I'd be able to handle that. But then it happened, and I realized that there's so much more to live for, that my life isn't about my legs.
My mother fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.
I don't think a naked body is particularly shocking or interesting ... It's not the culture I was raised in. I was not brought up in the United States. I don't share the [attitude] that you can have graphic violence, but - God forbid - you see someone's nipples.
Maybe it should be weird, simulating sex with your husband in front of people. But it's really not. When its a love scene with someone you actually love it's no 'Can I touch him here, can I touch him there' You know what your boundaries are, or aren't I suppose.
There are always good parts. They may not pay what you want, and they may not have as many days' work as you want, they may not have the billing that you want, they may not have a lot of things, but - the content of the role itself - I find there are many roles.
I love working and I feel satisfied when I know I have literally given all the energy that I have. That being said, work is not my No. 1 priority. I don't think it can come at the expense of your family, your friends and your 'significant other' if you have one.
Rise above the way society is going to see you and society is going to see you at the absolutely bottom of the totem pole because not only are you female, you are Black. Never believe it and never give into that, that that's where you live or that's who you are.
Every human being has a dream. I think what's special about the American Dream is that it implies, given everything that's happened with the history of America, that there is the opportunity to make your dream come true. So I think America signifies opportunity.
Although I'm up for working in any genre, I do love the passion and dynamic storytelling that horror stories can provide. Dealing with big questions and possibilities of all sorts of stories with life and death consequences is enthralling and exhilarating to me.
We're evolving as a culture as well and as more equality gets supplanted in society, well, in the U.S. anyway, it's only helping women. We do have much more work to do though, in spreading awareness about where we fall short in our culture and in other cultures.
If I see myself on a worst-dressed list - and I've been on many of them - I tend to have low self esteem for 24 hours. I just like to feel comfortable, and I like being excited about whatever it is I'm wearing. I hate subjecting myself to that kind of criticism!
I've had a job since I was 11. I had a paper route, I worked at a video store, I was a toy doll at FAO Schwartz when I was in high school. And I think that it's made me really disciplined when it came to pursuing acting, because I had no clue how to go about it.
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.
Well, when I was a little girl we had 17 cats once. They all lived outside, and they kept having more kittens. My mom made us put little ribbons around each kitten's neck, put them in a wagon, and go door-to-door around the neighborhood to try to give them away.
I only had one focus and one direction, and I knew where my spirit and heart lived, and it was in singing and dancing and acting, being that. I know a lot of young people dream that, but it's good that it worked out for me because it was all I ever wanted to do.
My dream role would probably be a psycho killer, because the whole thing I love about movies is that you get to do things you could never do in real life, and that would be my way of vicariously experiencing being a psycho killer. Also, it's incredibly romantic.
I finally realized that yeah I did want to be an actor and it wasn't out of habit, but I needed to grow up for myself and then kind of re-enter the industry with a sound understanding of what my sensibilities and my values are as a relatively formed human being.
The stuff that's made up about Jesus - that you have to go through Jesus to get to God and if you're lucky, after you die, if you've done everything right, the reward is you get to sit on the right hand side of God. All that is made up by men. People made it up.
I love TV. I know all the theme songs from the shows I watch. I'm not one of those who'd rather be a movie star. I prefer TV because of the rushed way of working-on a movie set, you sit around and wait and wait to do a scene because they're adjusting the lights.