I just try and do the best with every role I get to do. Hopefully the experience in itself is a good experience and people will want to work with me.

I think ties are great and Kathy Bates is an actress whose work I've admired tremendously over many years, and I feel a certain kinship with her, we both came from an extensive theater background.

Acting gave me the opportunity to do outrageous things. It allowed me to be sad, happy, angry and lustful, even if it was just vicariously.

I certainly do get at the end of my rope at times. We all do.

I was always much more shy. All I knew was that I loved to act. But I don't know about the other part of it. I'm not sure I had the chutzpah to go and prove yourself.

I was a very good girl for a long time, that's what really drew me to acting. The stage was the perfect place to be outrageous, to be sad, to be angry, to be all these different things.

It's such a great feeling to make people laugh. I know I've made people cry or want to slit their wrists, but to make people laugh is a very intoxicating, wonderful thing.

I'm hard to pin down. I tend to look different in films.

I don't have a political bone in my body.

Once I got to high school and auditioned for a play and got in, I thought this was really what I was looking for. Once that had got cleared up, from 13 on, that was it.

I think the people who cast films tend to think of me in regard to strong women with integrity and a lot of it has been very good.

That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe.

Some people stride toward a better future. Others have chauffeurs.

To forsake wisdom is to seek folly, to seek folly is to seek evil, to seek evil is to be in the arms of the devil, and to be in the arms of the devil is be in the arms of death.

My mind mends my motives and my notion navigates my natives, for we all are made of soil-our corrupted soil.

You cannot defend your design without knowing what you're designing for.

That which the Fascists hate above all else, is intelligence.

Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.

Listen to me, convict. I have not traveled all this way to listen to your war stories. So shut your trap before I shut it for you. Commander Julius Root

This was the ethos of the intelligence analysis directorate during most of the 27 years I spent there.

Generally, I have an instinct for the noncommercial. And the unpopular.