After I did 'Broadcast News' and got an Academy Award nomination, the first thing I did was 'Roe vs. Wade' at NBC.

My life has a great degree of dimension without making movies.

I have never been an easy fit. I'm a leading lady character actor; I don't fit in one slot simply.

New Yorkers have an intimacy with Trump, man. I mean, for decades.

I got the Mr. Incredible mold - the 3D, you know - it's cool.

Even very ordinary people, upon closer examination, can often look extraordinary.

I like to do research. It gives me a sense of ownership. That's very powerful for me as an actor to just own it.

I can very much enjoy taking a year off. Whereas some people would feel crippled by that, I can feel enlarged by it.

Drama is all about the moment of ultimate conflict for a person.

The first and most important thing you need to be creative is to relax, particularly for the actors.

When you have an actor on set who is playing themselves in a movie that is about the most cathartic, most traumatizing event of their lives, you don't even have to mention that.

Giving up something personal to the public, you are surrendering something.

Each project, I can almost feel like I'm like a different person.

Do I trust myself? Sometimes I don't even know, but I can only just kind of throw my hat in the ring and hope for the best. Depending on how much I trust the other people is how much freedom I can allow myself to have on that particular set.

Sometimes I go, 'Wow, this is a director I really, really want to work with,' like David Cronenberg. I haunted David Cronenberg for years before, and then he offered me a role.

I'm almost 60. I've been doing this for a while. In order to do this for that long, you have to make decisions based on lots and lots of different criteria, you know. I mean, the criteria has to shift, especially if you're an actress.

Actors do movies because you want to make a connection; you want an audience to recognise themselves in what it is that you're depicting.

In my career, I've never been a box office name. Granted, a couple of my movies have made a lot of money, but I'd do other movies which make very little money, or they're not seen that much.

Once I hit 45, there was a real downturn. But I got an incredibly provocative, delicious lead role in a television series called 'Saving Grace,' and I loved the character.

I'm too small and too short. I thought that was odd; that should be a non-issue to me.

I don't think it's wrong to make fun of some of the stuff that we think and we do.

I would say, yeah, I'm a spiritual person.

Do I believe in God? I don't know what that really means. I don't know what my personal connections with G-o-d are. But spirituality is soulfulness.

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.

I was playing 'The Flight of the Bumblebee,' and I totally forgot the ending, so I performed the whole piece again, and I still couldn't remember it.

Sometimes it's the script or an opportunity to work with an incredible director.

Sometimes it's the lead, but there are not always leads out there, so then it's an interesting supporting character, or there's a lot of dough, although that happens less and less. Let's have a good laugh about that one.

So much progress has been made with topics like mental illness and drug abuse and sexual identity.

I'm not a great Maureen Dowd fan, because I really find her poisonous, on the record.

It's not like television is now for women who have been put out to pasture. Television is for everybody.

I think that the audience feels a real connection with Zoe Kazan because she's so instantly lovable.

There are, in terms of numbers, more leading roles for women in television than there are features. That's absolutely certain.

I am often offered roles or women who are very strong, uncompromising. But it's fun to do 'Manglehorn,' where I'm playing somebody who's very open, very optimistic, very positive. I don't want to bore myself.

Pixar has the integrity to not rush.

I started doing repertory theatre in upstate New York when I was 15, went back when I was 16, and by that time decided that I really wanted to study drama seriously and go to an acting conservatory called Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

I wouldn't even go spend the night at a friend's unless they had a piano. But I didn't have the chops, the extraordinary talent, to be able to play the piano professionally.

It is difficult to love people; even when you do love them, it is difficult to know how - how to express it.

When the family gets together once a year in Georgia for New Year's Eve, we listen to music, all kinds of music. That's what we do.

Am I going to go to Heaven or Hell when I die? No. Is there going to be a second coming, and people are going to be stricken down? I find all that exclusionary.

Good female parts are hard to come by, so I go all over the place to find them: cable TV, network movies of the week, foreign films, independent American films, studio films, the stage.

I don't want to cancel the South out in my life. I carry my Southernness with me. God knows, it's a great place to come from. It's also a place I had to get away from. It is just an endless world for me, so much culture and eccentricity.

I think that 'Saving Grace' is pretty funny. I think that the show and the woman have a pretty great sense of humor.

I've moved laterally, as opposed to vertically. I was never a superstar. I've always had to move between a couple of years of unemployment, where offers are not provocative enough to take, and seasons where I work nonstop for a year.

I love an elasticated waistband on holiday. I look like the before photo of a makeover. I don't care and no one can see me.

I've been known to use white noise during fussy times as well as to help a baby sleep.

There's a certain section of the public who spot me in the street but it's never horrible. I'm not a soap villain who gets spat at.

I have always been really scared of trousers, they aren't flattering.

I'm not afraid of how I look in the mirror.

With any body shape it's important to buy the right size and not be dictated to by size you think you are. Try on a bigger and a smaller size in the shop and see what fits visually. If you do have to go up a size, cut the label out, it's just a number!

When I'm home, I never take work calls. If I'm at work, I work; if I'm home that's it, I'm home.