"We were talking about waste, throwing things away, and taking something that’s old and making it new again, putting the human hand back into a world that reeks of manufacturing. It felt very appropriate to do that in 2000."

"I thought, 'This is just too terrifying. I've never seen anything like that before.' I hadn't been allowed to watch horror movies before that. I was so traumatized I literally could not sleep for weeks, and it changed my physical appearance; I lost like 10 pounds. My teachers got so concerned they called my mother, 'Is there something going on – is she being abused at home?' My mother found a picture of Robert Englund the actor, and Robert Englund in the Freddy Krueger make-up, and pasted them up near my bedside table. So, every night when I'd go to sleep, literally for like a year, I'd have to look at it and think, 'It's just a movie, it's just a movie, it's not real.' I remember thinking that I was going to grow up one day and be an actress, and never make a movie that scares little kids."

"No! The other thing, that God brought us together for a reason."

"I have a two-year-old who just turned three, and my four-year-old just turned five. I have the same irrational feelings taking them to pre-school. It's this charged combination of stress and joy and anxiety and excitement. When they're away, you've got a sudden loss of purpose and this ever-present fear about the kid's welfare. The departure of our children from our nest is not an easy thing."

"I just wanted to study how to portray clairvoyance, and I finally took an ocular approach. She has these beautiful blue eyes and her gaze is gently penetrating. All the obvious stuff about her you can find online but I wanted more of the nitty-gritty, like how did it affect her sex life? If you're domestic ballbuster by day and a ghostbuster by night, how does that affect your home life? I opted not to go down to their museum of the occult that they maintain in the basement, Patrick and I both. We stayed upstairs."

"My husband watched it live online and I was awakened with coffee and the good news. He's my biggest fan and he was really rooting for this to happen."

"Faith is important to me. I wanted to make sure the tone was reverent. I'm just someone who marvels at God. I grew up Catholic, but I'm very comfortable in all religions."

"I've gravitated towards independent cinema because you have to work harder in studio scripts to flesh out characters, particularly female ones. They are not as sharply edged, they tend to be quite watery. They are not renderings of women as I know them."

"As an actor, you're sort of the court-appointed lawyer for the character. And that's what used to draw me to scripts – something in a woman that I wanted to defend, something that I recognized or wanted to understand, something that turned my head."

"It's just an incredible gift, giving birth. I never felt so empowered, so powerful, so womanly as I did after I gave birth. I felt more feminine than I ever had in my life."

"I think the worst thing that can happen to a good actor is fame. The limelight is a tricky place, because you can't believe what's going on around you. You stop observing. You stop perceiving. You stop extending yourself, and you become isolated. Our duty as actors is to remain compassionate and curious. Fame complicates all that."

"There are some times when I think acting can be a noble profession."

"I found I was really comfortable taking on a different personality. It saved me from myself, in a way."

"During that time, he asked me for my phone number, which I gave to him. Later that evening, he invited me to his room. I said I didn’t feel right going alone, so two other women came with me. In the penthouse suite, I met Donald again. When we entered the room he grabbed each of us tightly in a hug and kissed each of us on the lips without asking for permission. He was wearing pyjamas. [...] Donald then asked me "What do you want?" "How much?""

"I could have done a lot of Hollywood movies. After Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon I got a lot of offers, but I turned them down because they were all victim roles—poor girls sold to America to be a wife or whatever. I know I have the ability to go deeper, to take on more original roles than that. That's why I really appreciated Geisha, because it allowed us to show the world what kind of actors we are and what kind of characters we can play—not just action, kick-ass parts."

"Glasnost was a phenomenal, renaissance period in the history of Russia and taught me much about importance of freedom of information. The only real way to improve conditions of civilizations is to provide open access to information for education and culture, and to be honest about the past. Otherwise we spend our lives siloed from each other and we repeat the mistakes of our grandparents."

"I never seem to have excuses good enough to not to create every day. I cannot help it, creating is like breathing for me, involuntary, necessary, and the fuller I do it, the more alive I feel."

"Acting is not a profession of competing with other actors, but rather a vocation of sharing with fellow human beings."

"I'm the luckiest broad in Hollywood now. To be the lead actor on Scandal and to be in the highest-earning Tarantino movie-I don't get to ask for more."

"I realized that I don't have to be perfect. All I have to do is show up and enjoy the messy, imperfect and beautiful journey of my life. It's a trip more wonderful than I could have imagined."

"Your life is your story and the adventure ahead of you is the journey to fulfill your own purpose and potential."

"In real life, I'm just an actor. I play pretend. I tell stories."

"Three boys. I think it's less about parenting now for me and more about crowd control."

"I think they have this impression that I'm this miserable cow who doesn't smile. But I'm actually quite the opposite ... I'm going to try and smile more for America"

"I go into hair and makeup, and I turn into 'Victoria Beckham.'"

"I constantly look like a miserable bitch."

"But to my mind, it is not a politician's job to turn policeman. The most important thing about transparency of electoral financing is that one does not get the wrong sort of associations emerging. And they cannot emerge if one does not know the source of the money."

"They used to call me Cam-bones because I was so skinny."

"I’m just a regular girl who likes to go snowboarding and picks her nose like anybody else. I just like to dive into things and take risks."

"I can be shy, but I’m not shy with my body. Everyone is naked under their clothes—so what? They’re just titties."

"I was total trailer trash, babe. I can’t remember any real tornadoes, although there were a couple of times when we had to tie our bicycles to trees to keep them from blowing away."

"I only wear blue clothes because blue makes me feel calm. I listen to the same music, watch the same shows, and eat the same foods over and over again without any qualms. I find joy in my life where once I couldn’t because I was too busy trying to do the “right” thing instead of checking in with my own needs first."

"In recent years, the public has slowly become familiar with the idea that women with Autism exist, and a few excellent books like Jenara Nerenberg's Divergent Mind and Rudy Simone's Aspergirls have worked to build awareness of this population. It's also helped that high-profile Autistic women like comedian Hannah Gadsby and writer Nicole Cliffe have come out publicly as Autistic."

"A Netflix deal is fantastic, but it hasn’t changed my life, because I keep my life small."

"People think that if you get up onstage, a joke is funny or it’s not. No. The audience is participating in this conversation. The audience brings their own baggage. So I would never say you cannot do rape jokes. I’m just saying can we please acknowledge that women get raped? Men also. People get raped, and it’s traumatizing, and we do not have a language or a narrative in which to place that wider trauma. So just having throw-away punch lines, sure, you can do it, but people get triggered, and the reason people get triggered is because other people don’t care. They’re like, “We think it’s funny; get over yourself.” That’s because there’s no broader cultural context for the viewpoint of people who’ve been traumatized. I don’t believe in censorship, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to say, “Hey, be better.”"

"(You spend time in the new special responding to your online trolls. Why not just ignore them? Isn’t devoting time to them a way of giving them power?) These people are actually humans. They live and they say things and they mean it, and I can’t believe that in all aspects of their life they’re that crazy. I don’t want to live in a vacuum where I’m like, There are those people with dumb ideas. I want them to know their ideas are dumb but they’re not dumb."

"Autism is not a prison. It’s not something that should be terrifying. It is not a disability except that the world makes it incredibly difficult for us to function — and no one is asking what people with autism think."

"There’s a lot about me that people are like, ‘‘Ah, look, lesbian,’’ and really it’s about me not wanting to think about my physical self so I can just get on with things."

"I think a helpful way for everybody to think about it is that I’m not on the spectrum: Everybody is on a spectrum. The human brain is on a spectrum, just as gender is."

"I couldn’t have written ‘‘Nanette’’ without understanding that I had autism. I don’t read the world the way other people read it."

"I built my career on writing jokes apologizing for myself. It’s what most people do. You have to explain who you are, and you point to a difference that you have. That’s your angle. But when it becomes the only reason you speak, it becomes an issue; all your material revolves around why you’re different. The great freedom post-“Nanette” was that I’d put all that on the table."

"There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself."

"I am never not cross-referencing the trees with the forests, and it can be a very exhausting way to engage – but I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I believe communities need thinkers like me."

"Please stop expecting people with autism to be exceptional. It is a basic human right to have average abilities."

"I am unable to intuitively understand what I am feeling, and I can often take a much longer time to process the effects of external circumstances than neurotypical thinkers. But it is they who get impatient with me, and under that pressure I feel forced to guess my needs before I have had time to process stuff in my own way, and so mistakes are made...You know how sometimes you put your hand under running water and for a brief moment you don’t know if it is hot or cold? That is every minute of my life."

"I wish more than anything that I had known about my ASD when I was a kid, just so I could have learned how to look after my own distress, instead of assuming my pain was normal and deserved. There is no one to blame, but I still grieve for the quality of life I lost because I didn’t have this key piece to my human puzzle."

"As a coping mechanism for teenage me, masking was an incredibly successful tactic – I was only bullied intermittently during my school years – but as a catalyst for growth, it worked more like castration."

"Ever since I can remember, my thoughts have been plagued by a sense that I was a little out of whack, as if belonging was beyond me."

"if you want to change the conversation, you really do have to step into the murky waters, don’t you?"

"everyone around the world has a humor"