I'd like to thank the academy and I'd like to thank my mother and I'd like to thank my mother again, because I forgot to thank her last year.

Acting is easy and fun. You earn a lot of money, and you bang out with girls. The profession is given tremendous significance within our society, but it's not really worthy of it.

The script is the coloring book that you’re given, and your job is to figure out how to color it in. And also when and where to color outside the lines.

I lost interest in firearms because we had a dog that was scared to death of the sound of a rifle shot.

Working in theater, film or television are three different jobs for an actor, and I accept them as such.

Love is the one emotion actors allow themselves to believe.

I think also there's no question that Lincoln has been diluted down through history in some way, almost by becoming as iconic as he is, in a way he's become diluted.

I think that Barack Obama faces a level of divisiveness, and I don't mean on a national level in terms of the North and the South and the Civil War; I really mean just politically.

Sometimes with people their work is the most important thing to them, and sometimes the work enables you to do other things that are more important to you. I probably am closer to that.

The first perk of theatre is the girls.

If I don't need the money, I don't work.

Brastias. My friend.” Uh-oh, this couldn’t be good. “Do you lie to me?”“Uh . . . no.”“See? That’s a lie!

A curse burns bright on crime.

I loved to read, and I think any child who loves to read will read anything, including the back of the cereal box, which I did every morning.

This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion.

Those are my people, you know? The ones who are going to crash and burn.

Words were like objects, making the idea more solid -- less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought.

I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.

I grew up as a child actress, not a child star. I was an actress - big difference.

We see what we believe, not the other way around.

I can't give up. It's a rap thang. And I ain't goin back to the crack game.