“I was a tomboy and I didn’t have a bunch of brothers but I always wanted them and so I sort of adopted a few of my great friends to be my brother.”

If a woman feels anchored to a man’s plans, she may start to resent him for the fun she’s worried she’s missing.

You really just have to love the process. I can’t tell you the amount of film sets I’ve been on where people are talking about Oscars in the middle of the production. It happens all the time.

Weakness is something we don’t like to admit we have. We hold it against people, until we experience it, and then we feel more compassion for it.

Power tends to get confused with repression.

I am so saddened and grossed out by young women who look like creepy, old aliens because of their new Barbie noses and lips. Is that a smile or a grimace?

I think that women are more sensitive to emotional infidelity than men. I think men are more scared of physical infidelity.

I actually think the subject of young divorce is pretty funny; I’d like to write a movie about it.

There are so many young women in film school right now, and it’s just about foreign sales companies, domestic sales companies agreeing to finance films directed by and starring women.

I feel like the luckiest person on the planet. ‘Tron’ was such a departure for me.

At one point I thought changing my name might help with privacy, but that was before the Internet.

All actors should experience public failure.

The thing that’s wonderful about social media is that we are able to give a voice to the voiceless and to help educate each other. I benefit from it as much as I provide those lessons.

I have very high standards for every part of life – my work, my relationships, food, love. I can’t just pretend.

I love kids with a passion I usually reserve for hot cheese, miniature chairs, and Prince concerts, but I feel no stress to reproduce simply because of a fear of withering eggs.

This business is based on numbers, and the numbers show that it’s worth investing in female-driven and female-directed films.

I think it’s very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person.

I’m a New Yorker. I always have issues with trust – you adopt it from being a New Yorker.

Amnesty International adopted me as a prisoner of conscience, and that led to my – it touched me in a way that really led to me opening up my heart, I’ve called it the re-humanisation process.

My mother is a realist, and she’s had biological and adoptive children, and she said it’s no different: No matter what, they’re putting a stranger into your arms. You don’t know them yet.

That the state of knowledge in any country will exert a directive influence on the general system of instruction adopted in it, is a principle too obvious to require investigation.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

Experience has taught us, that men will not adopt and carry into execution measures best calculated for their own good, without the intervention of a coercive power.

You deny your own values and opinions, and you adopt a personality that isn’t you.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.