I'm always disappointed after an audition when I don't get a part and I hear, "Oh, she was too X, or too Y," and it's too much of a quality.

I have mad luck. I'm super-good at games like backgammon or anything that requires rolling dice.

Sometimes I feel that the people I'm writing are more real to me than the people around me. When you take that imaginative leap, you're living so much in that world.

I find playwriting really painful. I love it, or I wouldn't do it, but I don't love the theater as much as I love movies.

I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays.

Nothing's going to come to you by sitting around and waiting for it.

I think action should be revealed through character, so if you have a plot problem, it's probably a character problem.

What I did have was an incredible amount of belief in myself.

I was really surprised when I started working and realized that you're actually on your own, a lot of the time. It makes you really responsible, as an actor.

I think movies have much more magic than the theater. Theater can be a magical experience, but movies thrust their subjectivity on you in a more profound way.

And when I get bored, it's like the worst parts of me come out. I really veer to self-destructive tendencies quickly.

Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.

Already, Seattle is taking hold of her. She still holds Sedona in the dry tan of her skin and in her hair, but the fine mist of the Northwest is making its way to places she didn’t know were parched.

We have written too many books about love and so few about hunger and poverty

I was 23, and he was 86. I saw a very sick man. I just wanted to just talk with him. There was no physical attraction at all. He was very much attracted to me.

Everything truly important is washable.

The mechanics of putting one spot of color next to another, that is the fundamental thing.

I'm a great whittler. I can whittle a marshmallow stick really quickly. I don't think anyone whittles anymore, they should!

When a doctor is performing an operation, his mind cannot be somewhere else.

All my career, I've said this: Critics and producers think audiences want actors that only present the silhouette and hit the points in the silhouette. What I do is too dangerous.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction.