Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Some of the things I've seen a lot of my female-actress friends who are relatively famous receive - I've seen some hideous things. Like some really, really bad things... like, the FBI should be contacted immediately.
When you're walking around in Shanghai, I called it the City of Near Misses, because they do not stop for pedestrians. And the pedestrians do not have the right of way. It's those little things that no one tells you.
I receive really powerful personal letters. I think that always takes the cake. It blows me away... some of the comments. Someone will come and I sense their whole tone and energy when they're handing me this letter.
I actually can't watch blood and gore and all those things. I watch Netflix shows with my hand over my face, like, peeking out. Which is funny, because I'm on sets all the time, and I know how those effects are done.
I grew up with just my mom. She and I were like best friends. She's a very independent woman and I admire that about her. In my life, I've tried to be like that. To be okay with being on my own and being independent.
I've read a lot of different versions of myself - and all of them are true because it's all opinion, and they're as accurate as it can ever be. But I don't think that I've been deft at hiding parts of my personality.
But when I lose my temper, I find it difficult to forgive myself. I feel I've failed. I can be calm in a crisis, in the face of death or things that hurt badly. I don't get hysterical, which may be masochistic of me.
My parentage set me up to want to make a life of my own in the arts, but also contributed to my feeling a certain amount of pressure, especially in my early years, to figure out who I was and how to make my own mark.
I think that's the hardest thing as a woman, feeling like once you reach a certain age, no one wants to look at you or that you're not attractive or sexy anymore. And you start to feel like you're put out to pasture.
I think that when you're kind of just shoved out there and you have to be tough and you're facing tough people and people are saying bad things about you, that all of a sudden, you have to become a little less sweet.
My mother was madly adventurous. My father was an actor - he worked with Gielgud - and my mother came from a very wealthy family. She definitely wasn't meant to marry an actor, but she eloped with him one lunch-time.
I wouldn't change a thing in my own life, but I'd like to go back in time anyway though, just to some sort of eras that I wish I'd lived in - like the '60s. I'd love to have been in London in the '60s, partying away.
When 9/11 happened, the world, certainly in the United States of America, there was a unity. There was this sense of unity. And I have to say just from a personal level, it really felt good. We all felt the same way.
~I think what surprised me the most about motherhood, as sentimental as it sounds, is how much I love my kids. I mean, I just can't believe it. It's like a whole new dimension in emotion that I've never experienced.~
I've always been very independent. Even in relationships, I'm focused on the quality of my life and not enmeshing myself so much with somebody else's experience. But I think there's incredible value in being married.
Luckily, my children love broccoli, and although we sometimes enter into UN-like negotiations about how many 'trees' they need to eat before they can partake of ice cream, it is a vegetable that they tend to embrace.
I do regret that when I went to college, I didn't have a liberal arts education. I got a BFA in musical theater, so it was a very directed toward what I was doing. I wish that I had expanded my horizons a little bit.
I'd like to think I could do something great - a performance like Meryl Streep's in 'Sophie's Choice' - at some point in my life. At the same time, though, I don't want to put too much pressure on myself to be great.
In this sometimes turbulent world, the river is a cosmic symbol of durability and destiny; awesome, but steadfast. In this period of deep national concern, I wish everyone could live for a while beside a great river.
Appallingly, I hadn't thought about it one jot. I never daydreamed as a little girl of getting married and having children. I was as surprised to discover I was getting married as I was to discover I was up the duff.
I loved doing all those costume dramas. I didn't think, 'Ooh I've got to avoid being typecast' - you can't ever be dictated to by what other people think. I just do things because I fancy the parts and the directors.
I used to teach. I quote American history and I love words. I've read the dictionary I don't know how many times throughout my life. People say, "You read the dictionary?" I say, "Yes, and you can really believe it."
I still get thrilled by the energy that is a live performance, the fear and the panic and the electricity that happens on the night. I think jolting myself every once in a while with that fear is a good thing for me.
I've never really had specific goals and stuff like that - I think I sort of learned early on that if you kind of let life roll in at your feet, you will get a lot of great stuff if you are just aware and open to it.
As human beings we value the experience that comes with age. We are reminded over and over again with statements like older and wiser and respect your elders, promoting age as something to be cherished and respected.
I think there's something so wonderful about being part of the process from the seed of the idea to seeing it come to life on a screen. And to have a hand in that creatively, not just showing up as an actor for hire.
In my father's later years he asked several times that I remember him the way I knew him. He said that after his death, people would talk. They would say 'things' about him and he wouldn't be there to defend himself.
Sometimes I feel like the best role models and the people you should look up to most are the people who make mistakes because they show you how to overcome them and walk through that mistake with integrity and grace.
We originally developed 'The Client List' along with Lifetime as a TV movie - my manager and I became partners on the project. Then, we brought in Howard Braunstein on the project and produced it along with Lifetime.
It might sound so stupid, but guys do not hit on me. I'm not really sure why, but it's very rare that a guy will ever come up to me and be like, 'I'm going to lay down my game right now, and you're going to like it.'
I use the Koh Gen Do face cleanser and the foaming face wash. The cleanser takes the makeup off and then the foaming face wash is like a deep cleaner. I use this lotion called Fenix, it has a little bit of SPF in it.
Perhaps society should give actors the same sort of protection it gives to those who follow a religious life. Actor/priest was originally the same job. The theater is left wing magic and theology is right wing magic.
I play a lot of characters where I don't even speak in my own voice. I learned about focus and I learned to trust that things can work when they're not heightened and that it's interesting when things are pared down.
Your children are grown and your career has slowed down - all the stuff that took up so much attention is gone, and you're left with expansive time and space. You have to reimagine who you are and what life is about.
Music will always be my No. 1 passion, but I don't have to be doing it professionally. It's not really about that for me anymore. I feel like I don't have to look at it as a career. I can just rest in it and just be.
And we have not found any generational gap at all. If he wants to go a football game, he goes. If I want to go to a fashion show, I go. We don't have to do everything together. But we like doing most things together.
You know, I think I'm more of a micro-person, so to me, the context and the framework of trying to do what you love and feel passionate about, in supporting your family in that way, is the most important thing to me.
With all this talk of Going Green, Buying Green, Living Green, and Green being the new whatever, I've come to realize that, although we had no green, my grandmother was actually the 'greenest' person I've ever known.
I think it's very important for me to work on myself while I'm working on a character, and also it's important how I'm giving to and educating an audience. So I tend to go with people who are complex and substantive.
One of the wonderful things about 'Jason Bourne' and that franchise is getting to work the same people sporadically and over the course of many years. I'm not so keen on having to get to know a whole group of people.
The world is both big and small at the same time. So you really do need to know TV, film and theater. Everyone is kind of moving through all different mediums. So I think it's important to be able to do those things.
I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did.
The mainstream media is funded by pharmaceutical companies, so when you have the biggest movie star in the world at the time - Tom Cruise - coming out against anti-depressants and Ritalin... they still brutalize him.
I didn't understand that I couldn't just leave and become sort of a semi-regular. I had to be sat down by the line producer, Carol Himes, in my dressing room and told, 'I hear you're thinking about going to college.'
In terms of relationships, I've had two failures, although I don't like to call them failures; they are self learning, and I cannot say I regret any of my relationships. I've always said that I am a much loved woman.
I've had times where I've joked, like, 'I'm going to move to Vermont and become a painter.' And sometimes that joke felt like, 'Oh that's a good idea.' But it was only, like, a daydream for a moment to, like, escape.
I am often fond of saying the Trekkers are passionate about a hobby, their hobby is 'Star Trek.' They are by and large very imaginative, very intelligent people, and they certainly have been more than generous to me.
~I've never met a 2-year-old who is terrible. I'm so cool with every stage my daughter goes through. I just think she's amazing. I hope she's not looking at me thinking, Mom, are the terrible 30s coming on with you?~
There's still the part of me that wants to leap at every opportunity, but now there's the other side that says, 'Let's just wait a minute and see what happens.' That's intuition, and it comes with age and experience.
I'm an awful driver. I'm not going to lie about it. I'm not a good driver. I tried for a long time to pretend that I was. There's a lot of road rage and a lot of times it's directed at something I've done on the road