Actresses From New York City

"(Ripley is) open, honest and tries to do the right thing. I've always played Ripley as an ordinary person who is in extraordinary circumstances, and doesn't give up. I'm not playing a strong feminist statement; I'm playing this woman who has no one else to rely on."

"With the `60s and the `70s, television gave people a real appetite for violence and slickness. And, for a long time, there was a reluctance to put women in that world. Now, we`ve sort of forced our way in-and I don`t think we`re going to leave."

"I guess I don`t think of film as an innovative medium. I guess I feel that film kind of caught up to what`s been happening to women for the last 20 years."

"I think an artist can fit under a few different categories depending on how much you explore your creativity. It can vary from artist to artist from musician to performer to vocalist. I thrive on creativity. So in the long run I want to be an all around entertainer."

"To be given the opportunity to help shape new artists' careers and mentor them to see their dreams come to fruition is a task I welcome with open arms."

"It was heartbreaking because I found out he played for your team, not mine."

""You need to find the power within to make things happen for yourself. When you realize this, you are unstoppable.”"

"I think that whatever size or shape body you have, it's important to embrace it and get down! The female body is something that's so beautiful. I wish women would be proud of their bodies and not dis other women for being proud of theirs!"

"We are coming slowly but surely around a corner, not taking the things that we used to."

"Even when I was little, I knew I was meant to perform. I would watch specials on TV or videos of Janet or Whitney, and I would start crying because I was like 'I want that so bad'."

"I was born in Staten Island, New York. But I call my hometown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, because that's basically where I ended up from age eight on. But right after Staten Island... I've lived everywhere from Texas, to Japan for three years, to New Jersey. I'm this traveling girl. My father was in the Army, so I guess I'm an Army brat."

"He hit it in the entire performance [in Batman]. It's so difficult to do that in a huge movie like this and much easier to do in the tiny movies. That's why those are always the people who win Academy Awards. Heath was [amazing]; it's so unusual, and it happens really rarely even for the best actors, that you just hit this stride in a role and you're totally free."

"Although it takes place in Gotham City and fundamentally it is a movie about Batman, Chris wanted us to play everything for truth. The actors he chose for this movie are into realism."

"When I first saw it the first time, when I first saw him I felt... I felt upset. He's so good in the movie. He's incredible in it. It's so difficult to talk about. It's not an easy thing to sum up. I think he's great. Being around someone, acting with someone like that, is really inspiring and fun. It's very difficult to talk about. This isn't really the place where you open your heart up."

"The truth is nobody finances tiny movies anymore. I mean there are so many movies I like that I hope will get their money together. It's a different world than it was when I first started making independent movies. Something is really wrong right now. I was a part of it and things are so different now. You can't make a movie for three million dollars with a kind of known actor. It's impossible. I think in general it has to do with the financial state of the country. It's tough for everybody in every business, but the independent movies have really suffered I think…they would never have made Secretary. They never would have financed Secretary with an unknown actress and James Spader. There's just no way."

"I feel it's OK if not everybody agrees with me or likes me. The weird thing was it turned into people thinking I said we deserved it. I didn't say that - but Americans do need to look at their behavior in the world. It's easy to say, "That was awful," and hard to ask, "Is there a way I can amend?""

"I'm not the youngest person at the table anymore. I'm not the young precocious one. I feel like I'm engaging with people in a different way now. I am a woman. I'm treated with respect, as an equal."

"She's not your typical cheesecake pinup girl. She's beautiful and talented and has the mouth of a truck driver when necessary."

"Being an actor is looked at like a prolonged game of dress-up. America puts movie stars on pedestals. In college, it's the flip side. I sometimes have to justify my job to my professors because they're focused on intellect and ideas."

"The way Miramax handled it was B.S. There were a lot of crossing political agendas going on, and the reasons in the press weren't entirely true. It was like 'Are we seeing the same movie here?' I've always thought it's better to get people talking about the issue of school violence as opposed to trying to pretend it didn't happen."

"I definitely worry about that. I think about it all the time because that's the way Hollywood thinks. It's all about momentum and keeping your name out there, and college certainly takes you away from that. But, if I look at it in the longer term, it's so worthwhile."

"Playing Paula in The Business of Strangers was extremely cathartic and wonderful for me because Patrick Stettner (the director) constantly encouraged me to be un-self aware. The character is very elusive and bold, but my experience of having people confuse bluntness with bitchiness has made me shy away from it, or it has made me too aware of the reactions I get from people. So Patrick undid all that by telling me to ignore what the response might be to Paula. It was almost like being a kid again, and it was a very empowering feeling."

"I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then."

"I tend to gravitate toward the more powerful roles. As opposed to the doe-eyed girl who bats her eyelashes and runs around in towels, you now what I mean? Because that kind of makes me want to vomit.""

"I always loved how people like Jon Voight and Laurence Olivier shocked you every time they came on-screen. They were so different each time. That's what I hope to do with acting — be the chameleon and not get stuck in a type."

"Pa was forced to be a hobo Because he played the oboe And the oboe it is clearly understood Is an ill wind that nobody blows good"

"And why do I sew each new chapeau With a style they most look positively grim in? Strictly between us, entre-nous I hate women."

"I don’t know if people are meant to be together. You have to have a lot in common, choose well and be really fortunate. It’s not like you’re sprinkled with fairy dust. You have to believe that love will be there when you need it."

"It's not called stalking...it's called "passionately following"."

"This business can be very erratic and intense … You can be the subject of great attention, both positive and negative. You really do have to tether yourself when you're a teen star. If you don't have that tether, then you're really lost."

"Anybody who knows how to make a good movie, knows that it's a collaborative undertaking. To deny that its really dangerous."

"It just seems like the most successful, iconic love stories are not so easy or escapist. I think the ones that stay with us and resonate are full of conflict, discord and misunderstandings 'cause that's what makes drama happen or tension even if it's a comedy. I think people who make movies and have invested a lot of money in them, get frightened that if they challenge an audience they are going to repel them. And I think the opposite, it's really true. It takes confidence and courage to know that and then commit to it."

"Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them."

"Acting is the physical representation of a mental picture and the projection of an emotional concept."

"Beautiful women seldom want to act. They are afraid of emotion and they do not try to extract anything from a character that they are portraying, because in expressing emotion they may encourage crow's feet and laughing wrinkles. They avoid anything that will disturb their placidity of countenance, for placidity of countenance insures a smooth skin."

"Instinct is the direct connection with truth."

"I believe that luck is opportunity meeting preparation."

"A great woman needs a man who will love her and treat her with dignity, but she is so impatient that she gives in to the first man who knocks on her door without caring so much about his attitude towards her."

"Everything you do is different, and you find different chords in every character that you play that strike true with you."

"When we live our lives every day, we're met by opportunities, and most of us don't even recognize them."

"It's important not to lose who you are in a relationship just because it's nice to cuddle with somebody."

"If you love something, you have to set it free!"

"Well you know, I don’t think I have never really seen a film of this genre, where the female characters' sex appeal sort of came second. I mean of course they’re sexy characters. When you have a sexy secretary, or a girl swinging around by her ankles in a cat suit, you know that’s innately sexy, but the fact is that these characters are intelligent. They’re ambitious. They’re motivated and calculated to some degree."

"I am very independent. I can look after myself but I still need a lot of love and care."

"I read a lot of things about myself that aren't true … I've read that I've been with people I've never met. It's nice not to have any attachment, but, likewise, it's nice to have a boyfriend. I'm open to that. But it's hard, when you're working constantly, to spend enough time with someone."

"Scarlett Johansson thought she had the fame game sussed. On the eve of what was to be her breakout role in Lost In Translation, the actress had a solution to control her expected burgeoning stardom. "I'll just walk around with a big pair of sunglasses and continue to eat at McDonald's," she quipped the first time we met. At the time, the then 18-year-old probably didn't fully appreciate what was in store for her. … Robert Redford declared, when he directed her seven years ago in The Horse Whisperer, that she was "13 going on 30". Despite her undoubted intelligence and level-headiness (she worked on the jury at last year's Venice Film Festival), you wouldn't blame her for getting swept away with such exposure. The young actress, though, insists she has a grip on the situation. "I don't know if I've got swept up," she said. "It's so shocking when you hear that Calvin Klein wants you for their new campaign. You're like, 'Who? Me?' I guess you have to decide where you draw the line between you saying, this is fun, pretty and fabulous, and being overexposed.""

"I don’t know any other movie star going where Johansson has gone lately — certainly among the crop that sells magazine covers — and it’s probably beside the point asking whether she’s tired of the standard roles offered to pillow-lipped young actresses or is actively engaged in exploring the outer limits of power and perception. Of classic stars it was said “They had faces then.” Well, Johansson has a brain, and it appears to be expanding at an alarming rate. Somebody call the professor."

"I think Scarlett Johansson is going to become our new alien overlord — of Earth, and life as we know it — based on Her, in which she plays a sentient computer system that ends up expanding to fill the universe, based on Under the Skin in which she plays an extraterrestrial creature attached to some sort of hive-mind, and definitely based on Lucy, Luc Besson's new movie. … She plays the sort of average American dimwitted student in Taiwan who accidentally ingests a new drug that allows her to access a hundred percent of her brain — which turns her into, by the end of the movie — I don't want to give too much away, but basically — she's God, by the end of the movie."

"Fitness is such an important part of my mental wellness."

"I always come back to the fact that my own instinct is better than something I build in my mind."