Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was kind of an unhappy kid. I always felt like a cynical New Yorker trapped in a little kid's body. I started to get some pretty bad anxiety disorders around puberty, which totally did not work with growing up a mile away from the beach. I started cutting my own hair.
I remember thinking that people were crazy for reading the same book more than once, but I now have a new-found appreciation for the re-discovery of literature. The lessons we learned from books in the school curriculum are reinvented and updated when we read as adults.
Everybody takes breaks, and I decided to take mine. I wanted a chance to wake up at two in the afternoon and not be a subject of entertainment. I wanted to be a human being. At certain times and certain years, I felt like the Energizer bunny. That gets old very quickly.
Before I left home for drama school in England, my father took me outside one night and told me that wherever I was, the moon would shine on both of us. Months later, walking in London, I'd look at the moon and feel his love. Now I've shared the ritual with my own kids.
Oh, hi. I been married thirteen years, and lemme tell you, it's a thrill to be out of the house. I never get out of the house. I stay home all the time. I never do anything fun 'cause I'm a housewife. I hate the word "housewife." I prefer to be called "domestic goddess.
I don't actually think I'm treated unfairly or anything. If anything, I sometimes can't understand why I don't see myself and the people I know represented more in films. Unless I'm going to go out and write them myself, I don't feel like I can really complain about it.
In Britain, we haven't got enough money to make these long-running shows. We always do little mini ones. You have more control as an actor over what you want to do with it. On these you drive yourself mad trying to know what's going to happen, because the writers don't.
I look at scripts, and sometimes I apply theory to them. For 'Antiviral,' for example, I was reading Laura Mulvey's 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,' and it was all about the psychological process by which we fetishize the female image. It's all about scopophilia.
I've always been very shy and sheltered; I think it was a good way of starting to communicate with people. I was taught as a child never to talk about myself, never to talk about my emotions. Of course, now I talk about myself constantly. Now I have to take reverse est.
A lot of the times we don't see enough of strength. Imagery is obviously a large part of it. I think it's important to see her [Michelle Obama] passion, her complexity, and to see her be challenged. Whether it's about forgiveness, or wanting to do more, it's what it is.
My kids will grow up in a house knowing that it's perfectly normal for two men to be in love, it's perfectly normal for two women to be in love. My kids will grow up knowing it's all about love. It doesn't matter who you're with and everyone should have that experience.
The two things that I thought were really interesting about this character [Bow] for me were that she actually loved her husband, and he loved her. The comedy was not coming from the fact that they hated each other. Which is what television couples are usually based on.
One feels so despairing on some levels about what's going on in our culture, in regards to things like gender inequality. But there is progress. There is enhanced empathy and respect for others, we are fighting the tide, even though it seems like a tug of war sometimes.
I think there is something for all of us where you find a balance in your life, where you feel that everything you do isn't about your own creature comforts or satisfying your own appetites. Some of it has to be directed outward and there is a huge satisfaction in that.
I remember when I was doing Mermaids [1990], I was 16 and they gave me a B12 shot once. My parents weren't there, and when they did come, they freaked out. They were terrified, because of the Judy Garland stories. I know it's just vitamin B, but it did give you a boost.
Usually, impersonations come out of something you dig, because you're listening to it over and over. And you kind of start developing... You're really trying to emulate them, then you realize, 'I sound ridiculous doing this. Oh, hey, maybe this is a funny impersonation.'
When I first got here, I thought L.A. sucked. I hated it. I had this pretentious Manhattan thing. But now I've made such a life here, and I'm so happy here. They're just really different places. I can't really compare them because there's great things about both of them.
I've done so many funny jobs. I worked at a farmer's market through high school. I worked in the stock room of Ralph Lauren. I graduated to salesperson at Ralph Lauren, which was a big deal to me. I've been a P.A. I've been a stand-in. I've been an assistant's assistant.
But I didn't really enjoy my secondary education that much, probably because I am a very physical person and don't enjoy sitting at a desk all day. I just dragged myself through GCSE and A Levels, so it suited me very much to go on to drama school, which was very active.
Im extremely honest, and I pride myself on it. I dont try to be shocking. Im playful, and I know when something Im saying is maybe shocking, but its just the truth, I never wanted to be scary to people or upsetting to people. I simply want to live the way I need to live.
There was a time when I was really going to give up acting-- right after Foxfire. I was trying to find characters with a certain strength and things going on, but I was always disappointed. Wallace was the first thing I did where I felt their ideas were better than mine.
We do ritualistic animal sacrifice. We host orgies on our trampoline, every other Sunday. You didn't get our Twitter feed on that? I'm really sorry! And then, every once in awhile, we run through the city and drain people and drink their blood. It's really very romantic.
When I want to feel sexy, I like to dance-even if I'm at home by myself in my knee-high socks sliding there like 'Risky Business'… my sisters and I, if one of us starts, we're all there in front of the mirror, dancing, and it's just obnoxious. I feel sexy when I do that.
I gave up my struggle with perfection a long time ago. That is a concept I don't find very interesting anymore. Everyone just wants to look good in the photographs. I think that is where some of the pressure comes from. Be happy. Be yourself, the day is about a lot more.
I think everyone kind of knows and makes the effort to see each other and invites people to barbecues and whatnot. I think it was harder, probably, saying goodbye to Alice Cullen. That was probably the hardest, because that's the only person that I'm not gonna see again.
I'm lucky because my dad taught me to be frugal and save. And that's important because I want to know that I don't have to take an acting job for two or three years if I don't want to and that I'll still be able to make my house and car payments and buy food for my dogs.
Sarcasm is weird. Even not in acting, in life I feel 'sarcastic' is a word that people use to describe me sometimes so when I meet someone, it's almost they feel they have to also be sarcastic, but it can sometimes just come off as mean if it's not used in the right way.
Many years ago, I was in a Broadway show and I had to wear a fox fur around my shoulders. One day my hand touched one of the fox's legs. It seemed to be in two pieces. Then it dawned on me.... her leg had probally been snapped in two by the steel trap that had caught it.
I think we all have mechanisms that we use, each of us individually, to deal with pain that we've had or just dealing with life or whatever. Everyone's story is different, but we all have some kind of mechanism that we use to deal with stuff, that we create pretty young.
The great thing about having spent all this time on film sets is that I've been able to watch directors and how they work. I now know that this is what I want to do as well: to tell stories visually. But it's definitely my vision that I want to put across, nobody else's.
I think the biggest difficulty is that when I'm here in America, there's a necessity of using English, so I really have a great sense of really wanting to learn, but unfortunately when I head back to Japan, the necessity vanishes and so does my enthusiasm about learning.
In Greenville, we were blessed to have lots of youth arts programs. I changed middle schools to go to an arts middle school. Then, when high school came, I went to normal high school for a little while before auditioning for the Governor's School for Arts and Humanities.
Food brings back memories. I had a mom that wasn't a good cook, so I would eat my grandma's food. It was amazing because it brings back a time almost in Technicolor. I see her house, I see her stove; I think about what it felt like when I was sick, and it felt like love.
I grew up loving actresses or actors who were very classy but who seemed a little bit mysterious because you couldn't grasp what they're really thinking. I mean, Grace Kelly always looked impossibly glamorous, yet you could always see there was something behind her eyes.
I remember having a Mike Tyson T-shirt back in the day that I used to sleep in. And there some things that Tyson did along the way that I wasn't too psyched to associate myself with. But back in the day, just as a fighter, what a dream that was to watch and root for him.
My dad took me for an audition once, to show me, 'OK, you want to be a child actor, this is what it's like.' I sang a folk song about donkeys on this West End stage with this big director, and there was a queue of 200 girls all singing 'Memory.' I was terrible. Terrible.
I don't mean being famous is a perk, because one knows that it's not necessarily a perk, but there are certain perks to being well-known and respected in one's field. Public perks. Like, I don't know, general friendliness and willingness to please, just to point out two.
You still slightly down that you're ever going to work again, every time you finish something. That's the territory of being an actor. It's like anything that's competitive. It takes a lot of determination. I just feel lucky to be able to do something that I really love.
I had a pretty poor self-image for a long time. I broke into acting as a model in New York. I was never anything like a "supermodel," but I made a living at it for a couple years. The thing was, I was convinced that I was tricking everyone into thinking I was attractive.
I don't have time to devote to putting outfits together before picking up the kids. I'm a creature of habit and in that way, I tend to just go towards what works for me and what's comfortable. It's really important to be comfortable when you're running around after kids.
I never put myself in that box of you're an Oscar winner so you can only do this or that. That's one award, one night, and it does not define my career or it does not define me as an artist. I never wanted to get put in that Oscar box because that's a lonely place to be.
Who you are as a person is more special than trying to be someone you're not. Don't get me wrong - I have bad days, everyone does, but I know if I'm feeling insecure today, I'll move on tomorrow. I'd tell girls to realise it's OK to have bad days to get to the good ones.
The great thing about doing physical comedy for film is that if it doesn't work you're not exposed. It ends up on the editing room floor, so it gives you a lot more room to experiment I guess. But I really enjoy doing it. I'm very comfortable tapping into my inner idiot.
You have to move to your own beat. There will be times when no one believes in you or understands what you're doing and why you are doing it. The most important thing is for you to believe in you. Following your own vision is one of the only things that will sustain you.
Whatever I do, I'm always struggling to create a visceral experience. With my music, I'm more of a live performer these days. And film is such a different thing. It's where people sit in a dark theater. I want them to feel me as viscerally as if they were at a live show.
When I was in my 20s, I used to go crazy. I used to work out two or three hours a day, like cycling; I was never anorexic, just picky. When I was in my 30s, I'd go back and forth, now that I'm 41, I'm like, 'Whatever, man!' For the most part, I just do a regular workout.
For me to start working, projects have to catch my attention whether they are here (in the USA) or in Mexico. All I want is to be involved in projects that are interesting to me, projects that are a challenge wherever they may happen, in Spain, in China, or in Hollywood.
Seth Green, he and I are trying to figure out how this all came about. Because we don't remember what came first, the chicken or the egg, no pun intended. But I don't remember what came first, 'Robot Chicken' or our friendship, because we've known each other for so long.
I love playing women, and I think that this is a throughline to a lot of the characters I've played - they all have this aspect of being wronged. And I think, a lot of the time, the characters are actually wronged by themselves, and they find someone else to blame it on.
[Adrienne Shelly] explain exactly what she was looking for. This was her movie [Waitress].She also wrote the songs that I sing in it. She wrote everything. She chose the colour of our outfits; she designed the set of the diner. She was very, very involved at every level.