“I’ve considered having my nose fixed. But I didn’t trust anyone enough. If I could do it myself with a mirror.”

When I sing, people shut up.

And remember, this was a president (George W. Bush) who was selected by the Supreme Court rather than the people.

They’re called ‘angels’ because they’re in heaven until the reviews come out.

My mother told me I should be a secretary, but I wanted to be an actress from when I was very young.

I go by instinct – I don’t worry about experience.

Why is it people who want the truth never believe it when they hear it?

A large part of me is pure nebbish – plain, dull, uninteresting. There’s a more flamboyant part, too. Obviously.

I arrived in Hollywood without having my nose fixed, my teeth capped, or my name changed. That is very gratifying to me.

I also have intense relationships with furniture… probably because we practically had none when I was growing up.

You don’t ask a man, ‘Do you want to be in control [of your job]?’ You assume he wants control. Why would a woman be any different?

Thank God there were a couple of people in my life who said, “Go on, go on – you can do it!

Why am I so famous? What am I doing right? What are the others doing wrong?

I’m not weird, just different from people who aren’t different.

I just don’t want to be hampered by my own limitations.

progress, whatever your definition of it, is not inevitable.

It’s very often the artist who gives a voice to the voiceless by speaking up when no one else will.

Anyone who puts 110% into their work deserves as much success as they can get.

This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. It undermines both swaggering and sniveling. I cannot feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone. I do not think more of myself nor less of myself. Instead, I think of myself less.

I thought anything might happen if I wasn’t vigilant. I didn’t eat. I didn’t go out. I didn’t want to see anyone. But I survived, Paul.

If anyone can show me … that there is any reason – other than fear – to believe in any version of an afterlife, I’ll give you my piano, one of my legs, and my wife.

By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.

It was all devastating. I’d never dealt with losing anyone close to me, and I didn’t know where to put it in my life.

If there is any change regarding that hope, we should ask the Syrian people, not anyone else in the world.

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself.