Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When I was little, my mom would dress me up and take me downtown on the Carondelet bus, which in itself was exciting. We would go to see Santa Claus at Famous-Barr. The decorations were so pretty. The line was long, but that just gave me more time to enjoy Santa's Toyland. I loved every minute of it.
She'd tell me how she'd handle the backhanded compliment by smiling and pretending she was receiving a genuine compliment all the while ignoring their attempt to be insulting. After all, it's the way an insult is received that makes it an insult. You can't really give offense unless someone takes it.
Growing up in a Jewish matriarchal world inside the patriarchal paradise of Salt Lake City, Utah, gave me increased perspective on gender issues, as it also did my gay brother and my lesbian sister. Our younger sister is the perfect Jewish-American wife and mother, and is fiercely proud of that fact.
For me, collaborating is a marriage of the minds. It's two or more people coming together and making an idea come alive. Using their own creative knowledge or creative spirit to make the best version of an idea. To inspire an idea and to challenge it to be better than just one person's vision for it.
There are people in America who are absolutely desperate right now, who have no means to support their families, who have no opportunities to better themselves or their education - and they're not that different from the farmers and working-class people that I visited when I went to Kenya with Oxfam.
Boxing Helena was something that I think was pretty cool, but people judged it without even having seen it. It's not perfect, but I think for the story that we were trying to tell, it turned out pretty good. What it signified was really powerful to me: how society puts us in boxes one way or another.
Lost' holds a very special place in people's hearts and I wouldn't presume to say that 'FlashForward' will replace 'Lost.' I think it provides a lot of the same adrenaline and fascination and entertainment. It will help ease the pain of losing 'Lost!' I think it will appeal to the very same audience.
True happiness is impossible without solitude.... I need solitude in my life as I need food and drink and the laughter of little children. Extravagant though it may sound, solitude is the filter of my soul. It nourishes me, and rejuvenates me. Left alone, I discovered that I keep myself good company.
To be honest, I didn't have any expectations. I really didn't know what to expect. What I was most nervous about was the repetition of doing it over and over and over again. Does that get stale? How do you keep it fresh? Then I realized it's always new because you get to keep playing the next moment.
Guinevere is just head over heels and doesn't know how to handle these new emotions that she's feeling, as a young woman. Unfortunately, she can't reign it all in, all the time. And, even though she tries to do the right thing and be the good girlfriend and have her morals, she slips up a little bit.
I'm not twentysomething. I'm not trying to find myself - I know exactly who I am and exactly what I want. And I don't want a fan. I want a man who understands me, who challenges me, who calls me on my sh-t instead of letting me get away with it because I'm supposed to be a star. I want a best friend.
Everyone likes to stereotype things or write them off as not that serious or "this is just a phase," especially when you're that young. The music was never a phase, but the wardrobe was certainly a phase, so I think that may have overshadowed the music in the beginning, for sure. I was so outrageous.
I guess patriarchal stereotypes have, as is true for most people, created painful moments in my life. As a result, I'm an activist. I'm for women's rights, children's rights, human rights, animal rights. I want to be part of the solutions to try to correct imbalance. And 'Westworld,' for me, is that.
I can hardly find the words to describe the peace I felt when I was acting. My dysfunctional self could actually plug in to another self, not my own, and it felt so good. It was the first time that I existed inside a fully-functioning self - one that I controlled, that I steered, that I gave life to.
For a lot of actors, there's a sort of code of honor around playing something other than yourself, which I just don't have. I love feeling like I'm - I won't even say acting out, but performing in some deep seam of my consciousness or my family's consciousness or my past. That's really amusing to me.
On a fundamental level - I know so many women in their 30s who didn't get married, or they did and it didn't work out, or they didn't have children because they were trying to get their careers going, or because they were expected to be independent, plus have a family. They didn't feel secure enough.
Mine's called leptomeningeal carcinomatosis. It's incurable. It's terminal. And it's in a tiny space - a huge area all around the brain and up and down the spine. But it's small area where the spinal fluid is. It's microscopic. You can't see it. It isn't lumps that they can say, 'Oh we can zap that.'
During 'Hawthorne', I was constantly trying not to be too outrageous and keep it serious. This has been so refreshing for me because it's such a good outlet for the inner me to just be. That's the whole point of 'Glee' anyways - to just be who you are and that's enough. I really feel that way on set.
The stories of the first refugees that I ever came across in literature - that lots of people ever came across - were in 'The Iliad': the escape of Aeneas with his father on his back, the Trojans, from their burning city, and the defeat of their kingdom and what they had to do to try and find safety.
You want to be able to really tackle a character and make it a fully-dimensional human being who is complicated, funny, and all the things that a person could be. If you can achieve that, you feel great. You so rarely get to do that as an actress in general, but as a black actress, it's almost never.
I love Maira Kalman. She's an amazing illustrator and writer. I've loved her since I was in college, but when I moved to New York and experienced the same city she was drawing and writing about, I developed a whole new appreciation. Her work made me observe everything so much deeper and more joyfully.
I didn't actually know what a vegetarian was until I was 13 years old. I know in this day and age it's hard to believe that, but I think because I grew up on a farm, I wasn't indulged in magazines, newspapers, Internet, television. And so, for some reason, I was never exposed to what a vegetarian was.
If you're doing an indie and you have time, sometimes you can do take after take after take, but if you're working in television on that filming schedule, you don't always have the time to do that. You learn very quickly, I think, how essential it is to come in with the strongest choice that you have.
I love to work. I know that sounds ridiculous to say because all people love to work, but I love the homework that goes into acting. I love figuring out different ways of playing a scene. I love the energy of being on set. I love not getting enough sleep because I have to wake up early in the morning.
I mean, why am I considered an 'it girl?' Because I'm in a lot of movies right now or am on the covers of magazines? I just hope there is something solid behind that. Because here's the thing with 'it girl' status. It's great and amazing that anybody is saying that at all. But how long does that last?
I loved being on the other side of the camera and interacting with the crew. When you are an actor, you have to stay inside this world, but when you are with the crew, on the outside, you are in the dirt, working through all the issues. It's just a different way of working, and I think I preferred it.
I wanted to be a classical actress. I plodded along. I went to junior college in San Francisco, I was in a Repertory Company. My hero was Eva Le Gallienne, who was a great theater actress at the turn of the century who created her own company, and she wrote these hilarious autobiographies at the time.
I'm doing something called 'Olivia Twisted,' that will start next year. There may be something in between, but right now, that's the one that I'm slated to do next year. That's a very ultra-modern version of 'Oliver Twist,' and it's female-driven. It's an action film, and it's kind of dark and gritty.
When I first started working on 'Secret Diary,' I definitely felt like I needed to shape up. The idea of being in my knickers on TV was a great incentive! Now I try to eat right, and I go to Bikram yoga three or four times a week. I have my 'naughty' days, and I indulge in pizza and cake, but so what!
I would never do a commercial for something that is embarrassing, and I think that people maybe have a different perspective on what is embarrassing or not. Some people think doing a Revlon hair commercial is really cool. To me, that's embarrassing, but World of Warcraft - not embarrassing, very cool.
Animals are everything to me. I always say, 'Who rescued who?' with my horse Belle. She is my greatest teacher. She teaches me to be grounded, present, and in the moment, which I feel is key to happiness. My panic attacks become nonexistent when spending time with my animals, especially out in nature.
I got to Broadway a year after I came to New York. I starred in 'Butterflies Are Free' and got a Tony for it. Right out of the gate. Maybe that's why I wasn't very gracious about it. I wasn't driven. And right after 'Butterflies Are Free', I got married and then started a family. I always wanted that.
Well, first of all, I'm an incredibly gullible person - I'm so bad that when I said that to someone, my friend said, 'You know, 'gullible' isn't even in the dictionary.' And I said, 'Really?' As I was saying 'Really?' I will acknowledge that I then realized what was happening, but that's how bad I am.
I went to college and did theatre. After that, I spent about three years in Seattle doing French theater and community theater and sorting it all out. Then I applied to graduate school and got accepted, so I started pursuing my master's in theatre at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco.
When they make a woman's picture, they treat it like a 'woman's picture.' In the '40s, they didn't treat Joan Crawford movies like that, but as the big movies of their year. I'm upset that there's no 'Terminator' with a woman in Arnold Schwarzenegger's role. Because that would make just as much money.
We must constantly remain in a state of prayer; it is not something we do for just a few minutes now and again, or on certain occasions when we are especially in need. It is extremely important that God can speak to us all the time. This makes it much easier to seek the kingdom of heaven at all times.
Dear God, I've done so many crazy hair colors and outfits and makeup looks where I look back and it's like, What the hell was I doing? You can't be afraid to make mistakes, you have to take risks. We all have those moments we look back on and wish weren't captured on film, but we're not alone in that.
Helen Mirren is, I think, one of the fascinating actresses. Period. She captivates people and has tremendous power and charisma because she has never cashed in on being an exquisite beauty, even though I think she is. I can't say I'm anything like her, but I hope something similar will happen with me.
I remember that when I was in my 30s, a hot age for an actress, lots of offers were coming in, but nothing was great, and I didn't work for 18 months. It was at a really fruitful age, and I wanted to work. There was nothing coming down the pipeline that I thought was good - and then I got 'The Piano.'
I had no interest in being an actress what so ever, and when I was about 14 or 15, I was signed to a company in England. They owned a children's TV show which they put me in as a singer, and I was on the show for three years, and I left the show when I was 18 and started looking for a record contract.
I was gonna throw the first pitch at a Mets game, but there was a rain delay. So I'm waiting for it to stop, and the team's manager, Willie Randolph, comes by. Now he's already intimidating to begin with. But he comes over to me and says, 'If you screw this up, they will boo you.' And I said 'Thanks.'
Do you know how much you can learn from a mere pair of high-heels? If you don't fall, you'll learn a bit, but If you do fall, you'll learn everything. If you become successful, you'll learn a bit, but if you fail, you'll get to learn everything. Success is the dumbest teacher, not the other way around
My parents met because my father was an actor friend of one of my mom's brothers, but my mother has never set foot on the stage - she's quite shy. So it's a strange thing because people say, 'Oh, coming from acting parents,' when the idea of acting would literally make my mother just want to throw up.
I did a lot of serious plays, and I did the Oxford Review as well, which is supposed to be funny, but I'm not sure how funny we were when we did it. Then, when I finished my course, it was only then that I decided to go to drama school and try and do acting because I was enjoying it so much and so on.
You should only be doing the thing that makes you happy. Not just surface happy. That content, all-is-well-with-my-soul happy. It's the thing you would do for free, and if you do it, you actually become hugely successful and make a lot of money, because the universe is going to send you the resources.
I'm so grateful that the Internet and the DVD came along because, otherwise, something like 'Freaks And Geeks' would have been dead. At the time we made the show, those avenues weren't really available, and the idea of the show carrying on after it was canceled was something that didn't really happen.
I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.
I'm certainly not 10 pounds away from being an ingenue! Of course I would love to lose 10 pounds. I would never lie and say I don't think about it, but I don't think about it on a daily basis. I love my body. I don't like wearing clothes that hide or cover it. I love wearing costumes that show it off.
When my parents were divorced in the late '70s, early '80s, the climate was that you should screw over your ex as much as possible - get the worst lawyer in the world, all that. That's not what people are out to do anymore. It feels cruddy to try and destroy each other just because you're breaking up.
That's one of the lucky things about getting the success later on. I know how I want to dress, I know what kind of house I want to live in, I just know more about myself, and that's true about the roles I want to play and what parts of myself I want to express. You're just more in touch with yourself.