I love accents - I wish I could find an accent for every one of my characters. It makes it so much easier when I don't have to hear my own voice.

I like Cinderella, I really do. She has a good work ethic. I appreciate a good, hard-working gal. And she likes shoes. The fairy tale is all about the shoe at the end, and I'm a big shoe girl.

I come from musical theater, and a lot of musical theater is about accepting fantasy. I think it is more about just being open and accepting.

Find out who you are & embrace it. It's so much easier to face criticism when you are comfortable in your own skin.

That's always been my philosophy: I try to just be as straightforward as possible, and then I don't really have to question what I said or regret anything.

I do believe that you don't have to act like a man to be strong. You can still be feminine.

The illusion of perfection is an illusion anyway.

I find that in life all you can do is try to be honest about who you are and how you're feeling, and trust that it will be received in the correct way.

As an actress people always tease me like: if there's anything you can do to make yourself unattractive you will do it.

A man who's powerful and strong yet is able to show tenderness and vulnerability, that's really sexy.

I was a pretty scrappy, tough kid; I got in all sorts of fights at school. I defended myself - boys didn't mess with me. But as one of seven children, you have to fight for everything anyway.

Life has a positive and negative side. Happy people ignore the negative side

I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.

You can't bury a part of yourself that's so innate to who you've been, even if it's not for the sake of anything other than a pure enjoyment of it.

I think my very earliest stories were all intellectual exercises and I was writing from experiences I had never had about characters who were about an inch deep.

I've never invested myself properly in trying to write stories. When I write lyrics, mostly I write each sentence separately on an index card and then I lay them out and I just mix them up.

There's going to be other wars. I'm sorry to tell you, there's going to be other wars. We will never surrender, but there will be other wars.

A full and candid admission of one's mistakes should make proof against its repetition.

I just try to do me and stay out of harms way.

There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil.

I'm good when I've got a bit of an edge, like the Clint Eastwood type of archetypal character. The tough guy that doesn't say a lot.