I've always felt like I've had the ability to choose which roles I was going to play. I don't think that the industry agreed with me, but I've always had a bit of a headstrong attitude of only doing the things that I really believe in and want to explore.

It takes a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of focus and dedication to do a film, and it's just not worth it if you're going to be miserable for even a day.

I'm really interested in mythology and folklore. I'm interested in moralities, why we're here, faith... all of these bigger questions that I think we can place in films that allow us to question and give us a safe place to feel. Those types of questions can pop up in all sorts of different types of films - drama, comedy, action movie.

I'm just interested in all of the different ways that a woman can be. We don't have enough, when it comes to American film, that shows all of the different complexities and ways that a woman is interesting and mysterious and dynamic and really complicated.

I think my mystery, or any person's mystery, is the thing that makes them most interesting. I try to be as conscious as possible of keeping that alive.

I am becoming more recognisable in some ways, and some aspects of my privacy are going. But there's an upside: I have more opportunity to tell bigger stories and connect with more people. And I really relish that responsibility.

Laughter is the best way to get over something or get closer to something. It's one of the things I respect most about Amy Schumer. She's found a way to get us closer to ourselves and see the ugly side of humanity, but not in a way that's pointing a finger or that's angry. She does it in a way that makes us see the absurdity and laugh at it.

My number-one website is brainpickings.org. It opens you up to different authors and gives insights into the literary world. Reading about the love letters novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote to his wife Vera blew my mind. Fascinating.

I'd say there's more of a difference between a play and movie to TV than there is between TV and movies. But there's something involved in the repetition of things that require something different from me in order to sign onto a script.

A lot of stuff I was reading in mythology was about how women used to be taught to be wild. The wild woman was an essence that existed in the world. We're still coming back from many years of us being chiseled out to be identical and quiet.

There were times my mom and I butted heads - over my curfew, over something like that. Whenever we would hit these moments of emotional backfire, she would say, 'You just don't understand what it's like to be a mother... I could never handle losing you.' I was like, 'OK, but just, like, chill out.'

I'm always interested in whatever I can do to not look at my phone.

When I was younger, watching movies, it felt like everything was glossy and beautiful, and I didn't really relate to it.

When you eliminate all stimuli, your brain is like, 'Finally, we've got some space! I want to talk with you about something!'

I didn't realise how hard it was to be a mom and keep it all together.

As an adult, there are technical aspects of filmmaking you understand, like having to pick up a cup on the same line every time.

What 'Short Term 12' did was it gave me the confidence to explore my intuition more. The healing process that came for me for making that movie and then sharing it with people - I was able to see, first hand, that movies can have a healing power and they can teach us things.

I'm 25. I'm a white, blonde girl in the entertainment industry - it's so easy to fall into a world of pleasing everyone. I feel more comfortable showing all these odd angles to myself.

I didn't want to just watch a woman who was getting it right all the time. We're not perfect.

Growing up, I just loved movies. It was how I saw the world, which I wanted to learn more about.

I started watching so many different types of women, saw all the complexities of them, all the ways and the look and shapes they could be, and I felt it was missing for me in American film. I didn't see anybody I was watching in movies that felt like me. I felt rather tortured and lonely about it.

I wasn't perfect and didn't have it together. I felt alone. So through acting, I decided to be a shape shifter and with every role become the character instead of being myself. It meant about 10 years of no one knowing I was the same person in every movie.

I think the Democrat attitude is, "You know, we've toyed with you people for all these years, and we've been faking you out. We've been making it look like we want you in our club, but we really don't. We don't want... You're nothing but a bunch of foils, and we don't need you anymore, and we're just gonna wipe you out".

I think this reason why girls don't do well on multiple choice tests goes all the way back to the Bible, all the way back to Genesis, Adam and Eve. God said, 'All right, Eve, multiple choice or multiple orgasms, what's it going to be?' We all know what was chosen.

I can find them strategizing about any number of things in these WikiLeaks email dumps, but there's not a thread on climate change whatsoever. Why is that? If climate change were that big a deal to these people, don't you think they would be talking about it internally?

What do Obama and God have in common? Neither has a birth certificate. How do they differ? God does not think he's Obama.

It's impossible to go through life not offending people. All you have to do is basically have an opinion on anything, and you're gonna offend people.

That's what liberalism is all about, is promoting incompetence on the basis it's fair, because people would be the best if they weren't discriminated against.

As far as I'm concerned, the people who aren't paying taxes don't get to run around claiming that they built everything, that the built the roads and that they built the bridges and so forth.

Republicans and Democrats are obsessed with making sure that illegal aliens are granted citizenship. The American people are not. They're concerned about jobs, the economy, debt. They're concerned about a plundering country. They're concerned about a decaying, dying country.

Liberals are some of the most arrogant, condescending smart alecks, but they're just pure ignorant, and they fit the bill of people who have no love and no respect for the founding of this country.

When you talk about change, you know what makes it really tough for people is on the one hand you've got tradition, and on the other hand you've got change; in many people's mind, change equals modernization. Tradition, however. I'm a big tradition guy.

This is a frightening statistic. More people vote in 'American Idol' than in any US election.

In the old days, the media is who held people accountable when they lied in politics. That isn't happening anymore.

The value of money comes from the private sector in the form of price for product, services rendered, what people are willing to pay for something they want or need. That's where value happens. Government has nothing to do with that.

The welfare state is collapsing all around us. There are people that realize that we can't go on this way, but I'm not sure how many people realize how close we are to the collapse of the U.S. financial system.

The American dream has now morphed into an expectation. And if it isn't provided, or if it doesn't happen, then people feel cheated.

The thought that so many people get their news from social media really is scary.

There's such cultural rot taking place, such a disintegration throughout our culture. Values, morality, you name it. Standards have been relaxed, and people are not being held to them. People's intentions, if they're said to be good and honorable, that's all that matters.

How can people be so stupid? I marvel at that. See, I think you have to work as being ignorant - and if you're gonna work at being ignorant, why not work at being informed?

It was a phenomenon I noticed many years ago. Young people were just giving up every bit of information about themselves they could.

I live in Realville, and my problem is that I'm governed by logic. And some of the claims that are made by people on the left just don't hold up.

I had to learn early on that where conservatives are concerned, the truth about them is the last thing anybody wants to report. It's the lies and distortions, the mischaracterizations, the character assassinations, that people want to report.

Nobody in a leadership level in American politics is trying to inspire the American people. Everybody needs to be goosed. The vast majority of people are not self-starters.

There are many lessons people can learn about the left. One of the key lessons is they never give anything up. Once they begin a quest, they don't stop until they've got it. The other thing that you need to learn is, they're never happy even after they succeed. They are never happy because there can never be enough to satisfy them.

Washington is politics! Somehow if people have political objectives, then those objectives are automatically disqualified? If that's the case, the Democrats have no business being legitimized about anything because everything they do is political.

We want everybody to succeed. You know why? We want the country to succeed, and for the country to succeed, its people - its individuals - must succeed.

we heard a lot . . . about moral values. And you know as well as I do that there's a big move on to get people to forget that it's not only private morality, but public morality that needs to be looked at and considered.

Obama's only attempt to unify the country was to unify people who believe that his enemies need to be eliminated.

basically a bunch of miserable, angry people exploiting death.