The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.

Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.

We want our wounds to speak for themselves, but usually we end up having to speak for them.

Freedom from one man is just another one.

Bad movies and bad writing and easy cliches still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it.

Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight.

facts are aligned on shelves as well, necessarily chosen and arranged, assigned value by explanations neatly stuck where prices might have been.

Ambition is the bridge between reality and living a dream.

Never put your trust in men. You will be disappointed. In any situation, ask yourself, “What can I do for myself to overcome the situation”.

It's better to have tried and failed than to live life wondering what would've happened if I had tried

Do not romanticize the poor...We are all people, human beings subject to the same temptations and faults as all others. Our poverty damages our dignity.

If you keep your cool, you'll get everything.

Ours is an age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected.

When you shut down the giving you shut down the receiving.

It's my job as an actor to commit to the role and not - through my own inhibitions - run away.

In grammar school, I went to eight o'clock mass pretty much like four days a week.

At my lowest I was making nothing, of course