“I would take a bad script and a good director any day against a good script and a bad director.”

It’s better to be hated for who you are, than to be loved for someone you’re not. It’s a sign of your worth sometimes, if you’re hated by the right people.

I guess I’m larger than life. That’s my problem.

The key to life is accepting challenges. Once someone stops doing this, he’s dead.

Discipline is a symbol of caring to a child.He needs guidance.If there is love, there is no such thing as being too tough with a child. A parent must also not be afraid to hang himself. If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.

I have eyes like a bullfrog, a neck like an ostrich and long, limp hair. You just have to be good to survive with that equipment.

With the newspaper strike on, I wouldn’t consider dying.

If you want a thing done well, get a couple of old broads to do it.

Basically, I believe the world is a jungle, and if it’s not a bit of a jungle in the home, a child cannot possibly be fit to enter the outside world.

The secret of marriage is: separate bedrooms and separate bathrooms.

I firmly believe, however, that if your children have never hated you, you have failed as a parent.

I wouldn’t piss on Joan Crawford if she were on fire.

Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.

Life is the past, the present and the perhaps.

There comes a time in every woman’s life when the only thing that helps is a glass of champagne.

I will never be below the title.

Yes, burn your bridges.

Somehow, we [ Tan Dun and director Chen Kaige] were all privileged at the time; we could be outside of China. But at the moment, we had no sense of what the future was going to be like.

You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn’t need to have muscles.

When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It’s like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high – you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.

When I was creative director [at Estée Lauder], I was always being asked about my beauty must-haves. From there I had this fun idea to create a line of what was in my makeup bag. But I also love accessories, and people associate me with home, family, and beauty.

When I took the job as Estée Lauder’s creative director, the first thing I did was go into the archives! I love taking our heritage and making it modern.

As a girl, my favorite toy was my dollhouse; if I could still play with it now, I would! I used to love a well-arranged room: the furniture, the fabric, the lighting.

Not being a commodity enough to be hired by the big directors for projects that have some kind of integrity.

And then, there are the producers and the writers and the director on the other side of the glass, and what they want.