I had been looking for a New York apartment, but I said, Why not give LA a go?

I wanted to do something far from my intellectual and physical home, so I went to live in Beijing for eight months and took Mandarin Chinese.

We all struggle with our failure to communicate and our failure to reach beyond fear to love people.

I try to become more humble and more myself with every year. There was a while when I got famous where I was so confused and my head was spinning.

I assume that if people get to know me, they'll like me. If they don't, it's not my problem.

My major in college was Chinese Studies. It was very intentional.

I hope that doing truthful portrayals of people in a variety of circumstances gives people a kind of subterranean link to those characters.

I could have seen myself going into academia, but I don't love it; I just like it.

I want my life to effect the balance to the positive.

The Oscars have become such a big deal these days that it's just used as adjective.

When I was 5, my mother threw a party, and a friend and I wrote and performed a play called The Dutch Doll.

I'm a Blackmoore, Felicity. I get what I want.

A sure way to go broke is to spend your outer riches before you have saved enough of your inner ones.

Where there are problems, there are profits.

If you response to every demand, you will be in despair.

I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology and some philosophy.

Stalin said artists are the engineers of human souls. I wanted to show what happens to the soul when the engineers get through with it.

Spielberg's film portrays Oscar as a hero of this century. That is not true. Neither he nor I were heroes. We were just what we were able to be. In war we are all souls without a destiny.

That's the nature of research you don't know what in hell you're doing.

We do not consider our principles as dogmas contained in books that are said to come from heaven. We derive our inspiration, not from heaven, or from an unseen world, but directly from life.

A pattern has an integrity independent of the medium by virtue of which you have received the information that it exists.