Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There are certain TV shows that probably would have made me rich, and there are certain commitments I could have made that probably would have raised a lot of eyebrows that I didn't. But I don't look back at those decisions and say, 'Oh God, I'm such an idiot.'
When I went to college, being thin was seen as good, so everyone told me I was normal. Then you get older, and you start putting on weight, and you're like, 'Oh God, I used to be really small.' Then you get into the world of media, and you just feel the pressure massively.
In film, I was surprised when I first saw the movie 'Drive.' I said, 'Oh, God. It sounds great - I love it. Wow, this could be the soundtrack from 'American Gigolo' or 'Cat People.' But I'm surprised that the director would agree with a composer to write that kind of sound.
If you take 100 breast-cancer samples, 100 types of cancer have 100 different hallmarks of mutated genes. You could be nihilistic and say, 'Oh, God, we'll never be able to tackle this!' But there are deep, systematic, organizational principles at work in all that diversity.
In 'The Big Chill,' those characters are in middle age, thinking, 'Oh, God, I've turned into my parents. I've failed.' And in 'Beside Still Waters,' we're showing the struggles of people who actually want to be like their parents and feel they can't live up to their heights.
My problem is I'm not talented enough to do everything, but I want to do everything. I'm like, 'Oh God, I wish I could dance! Oh God, I wish I could rap!' I can't be a rapper, and I'm sure as hell not going to be able to dance for a living, but I want to do it all, you know?
The pretty girls get all the good stuff. Oh, God. So not true. I unlearned this after years of coaching beautiful clients. Yes, these lovelies get preferential treatment in most life scenarios, but there's a catch: While everyone's looking at them, virtually no one sees them.
I wanted to be a teacher. I love children, so I wanted to deal with children. Then I wanted to be a veterinarian. But by the age of ten or eleven, when I opened my mouth and said, 'Oh, God, what's this?' I kind of knew teaching and being a veterinarian were gonna have to wait.
People say, 'Oh God, you're name-dropping.' Well who else comes to your house when you're John Lennon? These were normal friends to him. McCartney, Jagger, they'd stop in and I'd order pizza or Mick's favorite beef curry from the local Chinese restaurant. We did normal things.
I was a magazine illustrator for many years before I became an actor, and I used to think, 'Oh, God, all those wasted years!' But now I think it's just been one big enterprise of illustrating. I used to do it with colored pencils, and now I do it with this voice and this set of limbs.
When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn't have the courage to go. I was a tremendously shy person, almost pathologically shy. The thought of peers critiquing my work - oh, God.
It just tends to be that the grass is always greener. If I'm doing a movie, I suddenly think, 'Oh God, I wish I could just get a play script I could get my teeth into.' If I'm doing eight shows a week in a West End musical, I think, 'God, how lovely it would be to be in a TV series right now.'
I don't care how inventive you are; once you introduce strings into the ensemble for a horror film, you're entering into a world where a tradition has been thoroughly established. So it's repeated use over the years is like, 'Oh God, another film with strings, another spooky movie with strings.'
It's only Western civilization that, God forbid, you talk about dying, when it's the only thing we know for certain, right? Everyone's going to die, so what's the big problem? 'Oh, God. Don't talk about it. Don't think about it.' I mean, I'm one of them. I'm not a big fan of talking about dying.
I did 'Slither,' so I've done seven hours in the makeup chair. So two hours for zombie makeup is like nothing. That's a walk in the park for me. When you do seven-hour makeup and then eight hours of work, you're thinking, 'Oh God, what did this do to me?' You're under that rubber forever. It's crazy.
I didn't really like reading much before I did 'The Golden Compass'. But then my teacher told me to read it. And I thought, 'Oh God, I'm going to have to read a whole book by myself!' It's not that I couldn't read, it's just that I didn't really like books very much. But the book that she lent me I really enjoyed.
Sometimes when I'm going to sleep, I think, 'Oh God, my future husband is out there somewhere and I might know him, or I might not, and I wonder what he's doing and I wonder if he knows me.' I just always think that's so fascinating, that even when you were two years old, your future husband was out there somewhere.
I had two starts, really. The first was going to the Italia Conti stage school, aged 15. I'd gone to sing, but one day I found myself doing an improvisation and thought, 'Oh God, I quite like this acting thing.' The second start was meeting Mike Leigh when I was 22. He showed me I could play people that weren't like me.
Sometimes it's hard for me to dress for normal situations. A lot of the time I'm either performing or travelling - so what I wear is either really fun or just really comfortable. For anything in between I think, 'Oh God, I don't know how to dress myself. But when I get on stage I'm just like, 'I can wear anything I want!'
There's a tremendous difference between alone and lonely. You could be lonely in a group of people. I like being alone. I like eating by myself. I go home at night and just watch a movie or hang out with my dog. I have to exert myself and really say, oh God, I've got to see my friends 'cause I'm too content being by myself.
When I first heard that they were going to make 'Beauty and the Beast' at Disney, I was like, 'Oh, God, there's no way I'm going to see that movie,' because I knew what that movie was, was just two people sitting down to dinner over and over and over again. But then when I went to see it, it was like, 'Oh, they made it work.'
The acting part of me is not me. The music side is who I really am and what I want to talk about. It'll be hard for people to differentiate those different sides but I think it's possible. Once the music is out there, people will start to realize how serious I am about it rather than, 'Oh god, another actress making an album.'
I feel like I owe it to the readers to try to pull back the veil and give them the honest version of what's going on. But it's not more fun. If Obama, as he does sometimes already, gets a little snippy with me about something I've written, you're thinking, 'Oh God, the president of the United States is already annoyed with me.'
I don't have a partner, so I take care of the mortgage by myself, and I was thinking, 'Oh God, I'm going to have to sell the house or find a new career.' I was not in a good place, but it was a real spur to get 'The Girl on the Train' right. I had to nail it and do it really well. It really concentrates the mind, that kind of thing.
I'm one of those people who can't watch themselves do anything. I could never watch myself wrestle. I've probably watched a handful of my matches. I never could watch myself. Even when I played college basketball, I hated film days... 'Oh God, I'm gonna watch myself screw up.' I'm just one of those people who can't watch their work.
Oh God, it's such a big world right now for artists. There are as many possibilities as you can have time for, getting your music out there with the internet, and Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook, and everything that you have, there is a way to spread the word. To me, the first thing you have to have is substance and content and real depth.
Personally, I'm not into reality shows - I can't even name a reality show that I was a really big fan of, altogether as a whole, not just from MTV. Like, if ABC has another reality show, I'm like, 'Oh God, another reality show.' But people love them. 'The Hills', 'Laguna Beach'... those do extremely well. It's just a personal preference.
On 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' I remember that sometime in Season 3, there was a Yiddish phrase, 'Kinahura,' and a friend of mine who was Jewish said that the closed captioning said 'Can of Hurrah.' And I thought 'Oh, God.' I never had bothered to see the transcripts but from that point on all the transcripts had to come to me and I checked them.
