I heckled somebody at the U.S. Open once. And you know, tennis, it's not a good place for that.

I got a horror film, 'The Burning,' and suddenly I was making crazy money, like a thousand a week, so I moved into an apartment on Amsterdam with a guy who was also in 'The Burning,' Jason Alexander.

With 'Broadcast News,' it became a non-issue, and with 'The Piano,' it became a non-issue. Both parts were written for more statuesque women. It was nice to change people's minds about that, because that's neither here nor there.

I was born and raised on a farm, where boys had chores and girls did not, i.e., drive tractors, bale hay, take care of cattle.

I'm not a classically beautiful person, but hopefully it increases my longevity as an actress that my career isn't dependent on my great, great good looks.

In many parts, I start from the outside and then it triggers things within. For 'The Piano,' I went, 'I'm going to learn these piano pieces. I'm going to learn this sign language, and I'm going to do them all day every day, five days a week.' It was a totally physical thing.

I believe that there is good. I believe there is evil. Do I believe that they come from God who is watching us conduct myriad never-ending wars and looks benignly on because there's higher purpose to all of this? I don't think so.

I'm a practicing Catholic. And faith is very, very important to me. It was pounded in my head as a kid, and I hated it. And I sort of lost my way in my 20s and part of my 30s and then found my way back. And I don't know what I'd do without it. It's huge in my life.

Being somebody who's like a theater geek that I am, I can just go right back to Aeschylus and Euripides and Sophocles: they were writing about gods and goddesses versus humans, and how gods could distort, pervert, or help people get what they want.

The self-help section of national bookstore chains in America is one of the largest sections. In a way, it's nothing new, and in another way, very new. People have always searched for answers; that's why we have religion. People have always been seeking some relief from their own mortality.

There's no way that anyone can know the ebb and flow of one's career. You can't know that. You can tell young actors it's going to be very difficult, but there's no way you can understand the difficulties and the rewards through description. You have to cellularly experience it.

It's considered a coup to become a lead on a kind of cutting-edge television series. I mean, that's a plus for your feature film career and for your career in general. There are no walls anymore between the two.

It's great to go to the cinema and have a conversation about something that is almost taboo.

This is one of the reasons I like to act - it's because acting forces you into situations you don't know.

So much European cinema has open arms to stories carried by women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. And America is a little behind in that.

I moved to the city in August of 1980, and someone I thought was a friend had an apartment in this wedding cake of a building, so I slept on her couch for a few days.

I love to look at physically beautiful people, and obviously others do, too. But there's such a narrow definition of what that is; the people who are my friends in life, the more I get to know them over the years, the more beautiful they are to me.

Mothers and daughters can stay very connected during teenage years. In the middle of your life, you can become very alone. Even though you're connected deeply to other family members, lovers, husbands, friends.

I'm from Oklahoma City, and there's a statue across from the site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building of Jesus. It's called 'Jesus Wept.' And I love this statue because it's a statue of Jesus with his head in his hand. And his sadness and his pain at some of the choices that are made here - that just breaks his heart.

If you've had intimacy in your life, you can be intimate onscreen. I mean, come on - I didn't know how to hold a gun, but I could play a cop.

I'm not a media personality, I'm an actress. I want to protect that thing: the suspension of disbelief. The rest of it is just distraction.

I don't suffer the decisions the studio world makes.

What does it mean to believe rather than to know? To surrender to something that's not fact but faith?

I had such total, unequivocal, enthusiastic encouragement to be an actress. Looking back, I really find that to be a total mystery. Don't ask me why. My father was just in love with the idea that I would be an actress.

The whole idea of death is something that we tend to kind of really not deal with at all.

I love fiction, you know? I find it fascinating. So when film really does go into fictional places, that's the most exciting for me. And when the fiction is about the person rather than about the place, that's even more exciting.

With longevity comes, 'Nothing is going to kill me; I cannot irreparably damage my career.' Those days are over. The most I can sustain are fender benders.

I've never had a career of that kind of box office power. I've always learned the hard way.

For every movie that you go see, how many leading male roles are there in any given movie, and how many leading female roles are there? There may be 5 or 6 really good roles for guys and maybe one for a woman. And it doesn't even matter if you're 25. That's just the logistics.

The unknown makes people uncomfortable.

There are ways that women absorb situations, and I think women are different kinds of listeners. They're different in terms of how they parse out problem solving.

You can tell young actors it's going to be very difficult, but there's no way you can understand the difficulties and the rewards through description. You have to cellularly experience it. It's a very difficult career in the long run, but at the same time, there's no long-haul career I'd rather be involved with.

The happiest person in the world has struggled. And none of us are perfect. And people can judge. There's so much judgment going on. And I just don't think that's what God's about.

I heckled somebody at the U.S. Open once.

It's the same with people knowing absolutely everything there is to know about an actor. I actually think the more personal information you have about an actor, the more you have to carve out for yourself when you go to a movie and see them in it.

I guess I'm more of a direct person than an indirect one.

The unknown makes people uncomfortable. And even living in a city that's as cosmopolitan as New York City is, there's so many things I don't know about other cultures, even though I encounter other cultures - maybe even 18 or 19 of them - when I get on a subway car every day.

Sometimes I take a movie that I know is not great; it's not great on the page, but I need to work. Sometimes I need to make the money. I need dough. I want to work, and so I'll take something that is compromised in some arena. But it's like, actors gotta act.

As we get older, people close down. We get less adaptive, less flexible - literally. Curiosity can diminish, and you want safety. You want what you know.

This is why we have racism, really: because people are confronting the unknown, and they don't like that.

The cool thing about those small-budget movies is that there's a tremendous amount of freedom the filmmakers have since there's less money at stake.

I'm not religious. I'm not an atheist. Would I say I'm an agnostic? Possibly. But I would say the collective unconscious is something I'm much more interested in.

I liked to carry the script into an audition because, for me, it reminded people that this was not the final performance. I'm still a work in progress.

I always had an acting crush on Philip Seymour Hoffman. He just wowed me all the time. He was just quietly so impressive and so private.

I moved to New York in 1980, and I met Beth Henley, who's a marvellous playwright and who I have a real personal and professional association with, in 1982. I met her in a stalled elevator - we were the only two people in there - and she's been one of my very dearest friends since.

Some actors say they don't know themselves at all, and that's why they act: because they can disappear into other people.

My nucleus of friends or something protects me from the machinery that is Hollywood. I don't think I'm on the same quest that a lot of people are. I guess that could be a limitation.

Is there a higher energy? I would say yes, even if the energy is collective. Even if it's kind of Jungian, or the whole thing is collective consciousness, that may be God as far as I'm concerned. So is there an energy that's higher than mine? Yes. But would I claim it as God? I would say no.

The forcefulness of life is where vitality kind of intersects.

What's great about cable is that the ceiling of expectation is lowered because fewer people have to tune in for it to be a success. You don't need 23 million people a week like you do in broadcast.