As a dancer, one of my many teachers along the way made the comment that who I was onstage and who I was off were two totally different people.

Everybody wants to shine a little bit, even a wallflower.

IMDB's not the most accurate. Even my birth place and my age are wrong there.

Well, I think that in every character there are little bits and pieces of yourself.

In my heart, my first desire was to be a dancer. I always wanted to dance and I danced from the time I was 7 till I was well into my 30s.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

When a peasant begins to feel the need for instruction, he usually becomes fiercely calculating.

Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.

When chimps threaten, they open their mouth and show their teeth. It's a little like waving a knife in front of you. It's very primitive, and therefore bizarre.

Without your downs, without your hardships, I don't think you appreciate the ups as much.

I'm really not tailored for responsibility.

The minute you have more than one voice, you have more possibilities opening up. You have all the molecules in all of those bodies and their make up interacting.

What force is yanking at our sleeves? This process of self-revision and self-correction is so common we don't even notice. But it's a miracle.

You think education is something to be done when all else fails?

The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.