"They had this movie called Juno about a teenage girl who gets pregnant and it's nominated for an Oscar. That's an unusual experience for me, 'cause when a black girl gets pregnant it ain't no Oscar. It's social work and a box of condoms is what that is."

"Nothing is unfair in politics"

"Screen credit is valuable only when it's given you. If you're in a position to give yourself credit, you don't need it."

"If you're going to be a whore, be a high-priced whore."

"Don't make these pictures any better. Just keep them the way they are."

"The best part of being on the stage was that I didn't have to go back to that mean Mr. Mayer after he tried to ruin my career."

"I will only make pictures that I won't be ashamed to have my children see."

"You know how I'm smart? I got people around me who know more than I do."

"The number one book of the ages was written by a committee, and it was called The Bible."

"The person I enjoyed interviewing the most was Elmo from Sesame Street because he is so unpredictable and he is always eating my hair and my face."

"The road less traveled is sometimes fraught with barricades, bumps, and uncharted terrain. But it is on that road where your character is truly tested"

"And have the courage to accept that you’re not perfect, nothing is, and no one is — and that’s OK."

"The whole culture of wearing flags on our lapel and saying ‘we’ when referring to the United States and, even the ‘shock and awe’ of the initial stages, it was just too jubilant and just a little uncomfortable. And I remember feeling, when I was anchoring the ‘Today’ show, this inevitable march towards war and kind of feeling like, ‘Will anybody put the brakes on this?’ And is this really being properly challenged by the right people? And I think, at the time, anyone who questioned the administration was considered unpatriotic and it was a very difficult position to be in."

"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."

"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 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."

"It is important to remind young people that peace is the only victory."

"Powerful women often get concerned with this idea that they’re going to be seen in this unforgiving light. Screw that. It’s so old-fashioned… It’s so uninspired and actually really cowardly."

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

"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."

"I believe that luck is opportunity meeting preparation."

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

"Just because you're in the spotlight, or just because you're an actor or making films or whatever, doesn't mean that you're not entitled to your own personal privacy. I think no matter what the context, if that is besieged in some way, it feels unjust. It feels wrong."

"It's important to figure out your own life before involving someone else."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"You have to be taught to leave us alone. Leave us alone."

"If you did not suffer from emotions, from feelings, you could be as powerful as we are."

"Think what you've just said. All foods should be healthy. We ate meat without any of the things they inject in cows and chickens these days. Bread tasted like bread. Now everything is refined, teens are fat, people have heart attacks at 39. Does that make me nuts? [...] In the thirties I was told I had a tumor down there. I met with a surgeon who was puffy faced and sweating and his hands trembled. He said he wanted to cut through my rectum to get at the growth. I stood and shouted, "Physician, heal thyself!" and I simply fled. A pure bean sprouts diet cured me in months and the tumor shrank and disappeared. I rest my case."

"I'll be eighty this month. Age, if nothing else, entitles me to set the record straight before I dissolve. I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book."

"Actors and actresses are overrated...Once just a few people knew about them. Then films started and we found ourselves canned like sardines and sent all over the world. It gave us an exaggerated idea of our importance. A scientist who saves thousands of lives is much more important. I wouldn't be twenty years old today for anything. Films aren't entertainments any more, they are realism. I come out of these films positively exhausted. I want to throw up."

"Plastic surgery is a way for people to buy themselves a few years before they have to truly confront what ageing is, which of course is not that your looks are falling apart, but that you are falling apart and some-day you will have fallen apart and ceased to exist."

"Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don’t take it off until you’re thirty-four."

"I was so tired of seeing these stupid, cheerful books about ageing. One of them even has this whole thing in it about how you are going to have the greatest sex of your life in your sixties and seventies. Which is just garbage.I thought about it and realised that there was one circumstance that you could have the best sex of your life in your sixties and seventies. That would be if you had never had sex until you were 60 or 70."

"With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child's problems will never be important enough for a television movie."

"I moved into directing for a couple of reasons. ... Most directors, I discovered, need to be convinced that the screenplay they're going to direct has something to do with them. And this is a tricky thing if you write screenplays where women have parts that are equal to or greater than the male part. And I thought, "Why am I out there looking for directors?" — because you look at a list of directors, it’s all boys. It certainly was when I started as a screenwriter. So I thought, "I’m just gonna become a director and that’ll make it easier.""

"In order for it to be good, it had to be honest on both sides [to both sexes]. Nora taught me how she sees men and how she sees me and that's what I got from her more than anything, aside from the fact that she's so funny."

"The function of a blog is on some level to start a conversation that you're not involved in any more because you've already had your say. That thing of coming right off the news — did you see what I saw this morning, can you believe it? — has a kind of fun appeal."

"I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive."

"Insane people are always sure they're just fine. It's only the sane people who are willing to admit they're crazy."

"Stare at me in this faceless way, go mad with desire, and rip my clothes off. It's terrific. In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind. The fantasy of rape — of which mine is in a kind of prepubescent sub-category — is common enough among women and (in mirror image) among men."

"Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine. I think of it as my own personal bride's disease."

"It struck me that the movies had spent more than half a century saying, "They lived happily ever after" and the following quarter century warning that they'll be lucky to make it through the weekend. Possibly now we are entering a third era, in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know, it just might work."

"[Hollywood] is a very male business, and it has in vast portions of it — the whole action movie part of it might as well be the United States Army in 1943 in that the ethics of it are, you know, boot camp and action movies and guns and explosions and all the rest of it, and that – so that means that about 50% of the business is not only pretty much closed off to women, but women don’t even wanna be in it!"

"Normal is not something to aspire to, it is something to get away from."