One of the ways I think I gain fodder for characters is by watching people.

Obviously, it wasn't meant for me to die of cancer at 40. Every day my life surprises me, just like my cancer diagnosis surprised me. But you roll with it. That's our job as humans.

The common misconception is that as an actress you have to learn what you're doing. No, you just have to make the audience think you've learned it.

I'm an old-school, embarrassing Joni Mitchell fan. Her music made a hook in my soul and hasn't let go for all these years. I even sing her songs as lullabies to my kids.

I don't have examples in my life of people who are all good or bad; I have deeply loved many people who are both, and I relate to those kinds of people on a far greater level.

But I've always been hard to cast, I've never been an ingenue, I've never been the romantic lead. I'm an actor; give me the script and I do what I do and hope it's good.

I was a young kid from Long Island who wanted to do something large with her life, so I can relate to that.

I've never been all that interested or aware of what people are thinking about me or saying about me. I think that has kept me safest and sanest.

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.

All I ever wanted to do was act. And pay my bills

I actually washed my window once, and it fell through - it was being held together by the dirt.

It is only light that can extinguish darkness.

I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.

Are you always this honest?""Almost never

Violence is avoided, when we sit down with others, and discuss issues, and work together for solutions.

My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.

I think serious situations actually make for the best kind of belly laughs. But theyre also the hardest to convert into comedy at the outset.

Death is a sleep that ends our dreaming. Oh, that we may be allowed to wake before death wakes us.

To many people holidays are not voyages of discovery, but a ritual of reassurance.

If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile.

The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.