It's a challenge for me to make people like me. Maybe it's just my desperate need for people to like me, that I choose the characters I have to play. You will like me, I don't care what I've done, you're going to like me.

To this day, I remember vividly Missy Elliott, Ludacris, and my grandma riding in a golf cart to set. My grandma went back to Ohio and told her bowling friends, 'Guess what? I was riding to set with Missy and Ridiculous!'

When I am confronted with emotional pain, I try to allow myself the time to properly grieve. We are caring, emotional beings, and attempting to suppress pain will only cause it to negatively manifest itself in other ways.

I'm not afraid of doing anything. I have no fear. It's made me pretty confident in that I can have a plane flown over my head or I can go head-to-head with an alligator or with a python, and it's all okay and it's so fun.

When I was growing up I wanted to adopt, because I was aware there were kids that didn't have parents. It's not a humanitarian thing, because I don't see it as a sacrifice. It's a gift. We're all lucky to have each other.

If I were to have any sort of solid idea about which moments were God's manifestations, they would be those moments where one has practically nothing to do with what's going on. It's one of the best feelings in the world.

Of course drugs were fun. And that's what's so stupid about anti-drug campaigns; they don't admit that. I can't say I feel particularly scarred or lessened by my experimentation with drugs. They've gotten a very bad name.

I was the girl who got out of my athletic requirement by managing the boys' sports teams. Which is pretty ingenious, because when I was a sophomore, I got a prom date out of it. That was really strong planning on my part.

If you’re passionate about something then it will definitely work out for you. You should never stop believing in something, and you shouldn’t listen to anyone who tells you otherwise. Never give up on something you love.

I love making music and performing for my fans, and I want to be happy and doing what I love still. I'm not taking a moment of this for granted, and if I'm lucky I'll be able to keep doing this. I love it. I'm very happy.

Broadway is amazing because you're performing for such an intimate group of people. You're living in the moment and whatever happens happens, and you go on. You can't say cut and redo it, you have to be on the whole time.

I worked with someone who told me they'd never like me. But for some reason, I just felt like I needed her approval. So I started changing myself to please her. It made me stop being social and friendly. I was so unhappy.

I really love doing indie projects, I think the characters that are available in indie games especially, like a lot of the indie games I've done, have been really rich interesting characters for someone of my vocal range.

Some sort of creativity is within everybody; I think that's just a part of the human spirit. I think there's no human being on earth who is not creative in some way, because I think it's just a part of our genetic makeup.

I prefer to drink my salad to get veggies and other nutrients throughout the day, so smoothies are a staple of my day-to-day diet. They taste delicious even when they are packed with spinach, kale, and healthy superfoods.

That undeniable love for your child... that's something I totally get. And the bumps in the road, too. Like, any parent that thinks they have a perfect relationship with their child is a liar, or they're just not present.

I know that Daddy had an important job. He was working to change the world so everyone would love wildlife like he did. He built a hospital to help animals, and he bought lots of land to give animals a safe place to live.

Forget all the bars and schmoozing and everybody checking out everybody else. My ideal date would be to park in a dark place, check out the stars, and have a great conversation. When all else fails, you can just make out.

You never stop thinking about technique, but really, the reason we're actors is because of the sheer joy of those few moments you get every now and again where you're totally present. The rest is just struggle and misery.

I've never had a ground-breaking hit that changed the deal. It's always been slowly but surely for me, and I've never had a moment of sheer panic when I thought I was never going to work again. So I can't really complain.

Television is my home. It's a special breed of person that can do nine months on and three months off, with 22 episodes of one-hour shows. It's very hard work. It can be a grind. It's not a grind for me. I relish in that.

I don't have muscle tone. I'm just flab. I'm not a daredevil. I don't like pain, I don't like cold, I don't want to feel exhausted. But the sense of accomplishment is something I've never felt before, in a physical sense.

I want my son to grow up with a mom that he could see and look at her life with all the mistakes and with all the failures and all the flaws and say, "My mom lived an authentic life. That was the life she wanted to live."

People always say to me, "What's wrong with Hollywood? They don't want to make female-driven movies." And that's not where the problem lies. It lies with us, in society. When we make these movies, nobody goes to see them.

There were nine children in my fathers family and eight in my mothers. My grandparents did the best with what they had. After the Depression, they were scratching out a living and working hard. They kept the family going.

T.V. is the place to do the kind of films that were done in the 40s and 50s: the little guy against the system. There are so many opportunities in T.V. to do more character pieces. Everything is so hard-edged in features.

Infertility costs an average of about $16-20,000 per procedure, and you don't always get pregnant the first time. I had to go through it seven times. And adoption and surrogacy are not covered through insurance companies.

I made my career off posing in swimsuits and doing all the swimsuit issues and posters, but I will tell you that that little bit of material on an itsy-bitsy bikini - taking that off was very nerve-racking the first time.

I have this home in New York, I have a long-term relationship with my boyfriend, who's from Australia, and I had this business that I had maintain. Even though I wasn't actively shooting, there's a lot of peripheral work.

I think failure is just a part of life. You can't avoid it in anything. I just accept it as a part of life and something that's going to happen, and you use it to grow. You use it, you learn from it, and you grow from it.

I'm like one of the tallest ones on 'Scandal.' If I'm wearing my four-inch Abby Whelan high heels, I hover over everybody. I literally have a lower pair of high heels that I wear when I do one of the scenes with the guys.

I love being my age. I love getting older. What you lose in looks, you gain in wisdom. I might not be as physically beautiful on the outside today, but I'm much more beautiful on the inside. True beauty comes from inside.

Except for Carrie Bradshaws in the opening credits of Sex and the City, I dont know if the tutu has ever really been trendy, but I want to wear one. I want to dance around in it, and I want that to be socially acceptable.

Crazy Jane is a complex individual who always has a lot brewing. She tries to hold things together on the surface, which is something that we all try to do. She uses these different personalities to try to cope with life.

I truly, genuinely like clothes. Making them is an art form, and wearing them is a form of self-expression. I find it very emotional because I can remember moments in my life - my mood, how I felt - through these clothes.

Indecision is the most unsexy thing on the planet. I don't know if I'm sexy but I think decisiveness is sexy. I also lose trust and faith in them when I realise I'm a bit on my own and that's a very disheartening feeling.

One thing that got me started on it was the jean jacket. It's an item that could make you believe you're in the 50s or punk-rock 70s or grunge 90s. I was really focused on timelessness, and I think music is very timeless.

I mean, it's amazing that I get to meet all these people. I've learned so much from all of them. I just worked with Sofia Coppola and that was amazing. I learned so much from her. I can't even describe how much fun I had.

There are some extremely acceptable male comedians out there: Joel Osteen, Abraham Lincoln, the man who played Phil Spector in HBO's 'Phil Spector.' But even those guys, while insightful and amusing, aren't exactly funny.

I had friends at school, but I was never part of a gang and I dreamed of that sense of belonging to a group. You know, where people would call me 'Em' and shout across the bar, 'Em, what are you drinking?' after the show.

I still have friends from primary school. And my two best girlfriends are from secondary school. I don't have to explain anything to them. I don't have to apologize for anything. They know. There's no judgment in any way.

I was very insecure growing up, and even though I'm not that girl anymore, I think that the passion, that not feeling pretty and being insecure, is where my soul came from. And from early childhood, I let it free onstage.

I was thinking I would miss the rain. I wonder if you can experience the rain in Heaven, if God will let you dip your wings down... But my biggest expectation now is just to live. I will not go gently into that goodnight.

Every story about me is so heavy and dramatic. That's not how I do life. But that's the impression people have, and that's what keeps getting reiterated. As if I'm still stuck in all the muck of the past. And I am so not.

I know for some girls, tight clothes make them feel like they can take on the world-and that's fine too. But I don't think that sexy only means showing skin: It's all about wearing whatever makes you feel the most badass.

I miss improv. I hate it in a way - watching it, doing it - but only because it's so challenging and nerve wracking. Improv is the only belief system I've ever experienced that directly works on how to be. Just how to be.

In Los Angeles there's, like, this awful image because the girls are so skinny. I don't think it's attractive whatsoever, and I also think that it gives a bad image to kids that are in their early teens. It's not healthy.

I am definitely not the normal girl. I'm not some skinny blond, you know? I chose strong over skinny. So, I am honored that people think I'm sexy. I'm just really happy people accept me as I am and I don't have to change.

When I was on Broadway when I was little, I remember always driving through Times Square with my dad to the theater. Now when I go back, you can't even drive on Broadway in the 40s. New Times Square is too touristy to me.

I have a storage unit, as I moved out of a bigger house into a smaller house in L.A. I put all my stuff in a storage unit, where I have the most amazing collection of bad paintings, which took me 10 years to put together.

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