I've been singing since I was nine or ten.

If you act brave, you can seem brave, and if you do it enough, you can talk yourself into believing you're brave.

When I'm given an opportunity with music and goodness, then I want to do that [play that role]. I want to go all the way to the edge of that and make it as big as I can.

I suppose there are a lot of reasons to be jaded or sarcastic or bitter in life, but I hang on to the reasons why life is beautiful.

I was raised in Oklahoma. I was actually born in Tulsa, but I grew up in a small town on the west side of Oklahoma called Elk City on a farm, where my dad grew up, actually.

Sunday's my favorite day - that one matinee in the middle of the day!

If a man thinks you're beautiful or thinks you're strong or thinks you're smart, take the power and use it, but don't need it.

If you have kids, in my opinion, your priorities better shift to them.

I want to work, but I certainly am not going to be clawing at empty things when I can completely fill up my bucket with them - the other is a waste of my time.

I think a lot of the way I live my life is not just for me, which has sometimes been a burden. A lot of the choices I make are in order to make them [my parents] proud.

I think in this business [acting] there's the option to do a lot of things and say, "I don't care. I'm just going to do what I want," but what I do affects a lot of people.

With enough hope, you can set a fire to find the way out of the darkness.

In the struggle for life, a taste for truth is a luxury--or else a disability.

Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels.

We cannot think without language, we cannot process experience without story.

I like when the ice gets thin, the going gets rough, the guests get edgy.

[on the Republican party] A party with a narrow vision, a party that is afraid of the future.

You would be amazed at the pompadour that I was rocking in the first job I had on the soap opera called 'Loving,' my first contract job.

I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.

I do dream about Afghanistan. I wake up and think I'm still there.

I always try to be true to who I am and just be myself.