Honestly, I am not trying to discourage anyone from becoming an actress, but if you want to become one be prepared to face everything that comes - along with it

I've been kind of submerged in my own little geographic location for a really long time in Venice Beach

I remember when I first started in the business, I lost a lot of friends. Some were jealous, some were annoyed at the fact that I was an actress.

Right afterward I read Fast Food Nation. That book changed my life: It made me a vegetarian.

If it comes back, I think that Friday night is not a good night to be on.

If you believe that God put you here to act, then you have to be different. Go into casting offices, with something other girls don't have

IF YOU'RE DOING SOMETHING THAT TERRIFIES YOU, MOST LIKELY YOU'RE DOING THE RIGHT THING.

My own personal connection with God was not in a religious sense, so I wasn't really thinking in that way when I got the role and when I started doing it.

My advice is to make acting your second career choice

A business like acting is 90% luck. You can be a star one minute and out of work the next

I have tons of jewelry. I like to wear a lot of it

Like language, books serve to express us, but also to complete us, furnishing, through a variety of excerpted and reworked fragments, the missing elements of our personality.

The biggest enemies we have to overcome on the road to success are not a lack of ability and a lack of opportunity but fears of failure and rejection and the doubts that they trigger.

A debt ... is just an exchange that has not been brought to completion.

Why I wake up in the morning is that I'm still alive, and I want to figure out whatever I can before it's over.

When you continue to give without receiving, the only thing you are proving is that you know how to be taken advantage of.

Great leaders encourage leadership development. By openly developing themselves

Apple trees bear apples, wheat stalks produce wheat, and forgiven people forgive people.

I don't have control over how people choose to perceive me. The only thing I have control over is my writing.

We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life.

If you can't win your race, make sure the guy ahead of you breaks the record.