“Not only is my wardrobe totally average, my body’s totally average. I love all the candy-fantasy fulfillment of Sex and the City.”

If you retain nothing else, always remember the most important Rule of Beauty. “Who cares?”

A Clinical Study. Taking some time to read each night really taught me how to feign narcolepsy when my husband asked me what my “plan” was for taking down the Christmas tree.

You’ve got to experience failure to understand that you can survive it.

I want to thank my parents for somehow raising me to have confidence that is disproportionate with my looks and abilities.

My work is my work. I take my work seriously but I don’t take myself too seriously.

I feel like there is a lot of inherent humor in the stress and insanity surrounding that process.

To say I’m an overrated troll, when you have never even seen me guard a bridge, is patently unfair.

I was first in my class at Johns Hopkins, so?” Make statements, with your actions and your voice.

When a coworker shows me cute pictures of her dog, I struggle to respond correctly, like an autistic person who has been taught to recognize human emotions from flash cards. In short, I am the worst.

There are no mistakes only opportunities.

I am going to dedicate myself, full time, to my day-drinking.

You can’t be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. You have to go down the chute.

It was reported that the New York Knicks have won all 12 of the home games attended by magician David Blaine. A spokesman for the Knicks said, ‘if this is what it takes to win, it’s not worth it.’

If you want to be a screenwriter, take an acting class to get a sense of what you’re asking actors to do. Learning other skills will help you communicate with people and respect what they do.

I think women dress for other women to let them know what their deal is. Because if women were only dressing for men, there would be nothing but Victoria’s Secret. There would be no Dior.

An acting teacher once told me, ‘Greet everything with yes… Even if you abandon one idea for another one, saying yes allows you to move forward.’

Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence.

A gardener is never shut out from his garden, wherever he may be. Its comfort never fails. Though the city may close about him, and the grime and soot descend upon him, he can still wander in his garden, does he but close his eyes.

Most people are walking around the city like corpses; they aren’t alive enough to notice the trash. They come from other places and they see it as a big garbage dump.

Cities are gentrified by the following types of people in sequence: first the risk-oblivious (artists), then the risk-aware (developers), finally the risk adverse (dentists from New Jersey).

NY is the city it is today in part because of the contributions from generations of artistic visionaries

Suppose we took a thousand negatives… combining the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city – that would be my favorite picture.

Lincolnshire is the Idaho of England. You were either going to drive a tractor for the rest of your life or head for the city to work in a factory.

And when I told my sons I might be in City of Ember, they said, ‘Oh! You’re gonna be the mayor?’ And I hadn’t even read the script yet.