I like a confident man.

I love a challenge. I do.

I want four kids.

For 'The Bachelor,' I went through the entire process and was told I was chosen, and then I told my boss... It turned out that my boss was a huge fan of the show, and he was ecstatic. My promise to my firm was that I would do the filming then go back to work, and I did.

I am a never-say-never person.

Especially as a woman, the jury sums you up immediately and is listening to everything you're saying. You have to be on your game all the time, and that prepares you for being in front of the camera. The difference is, when I am in front of a jury, I am not talking about my emotions and my life.

As the first of anything, you're going to be judged. If you accept the good, you have to accept the bad.

Football, basketball, and track are my favorites, but I really enjoy watching all sports.

I'm a trial attorney and I specialize in defense civil litigation. My firm represents businesses and organizations in whatever aspect they get sued, whether it's commercial litigation, to personal injury, liability, contracts, we litigate for them on their behalf.

Well, I was a huge 'Matlock' fan as a child.

I know there are going to be people who criticize what I do no matter what, but I'm just trying to not get caught up in it.

My dad is very supportive about me being the Bachelorette. He realizes what an amazing experience it is.

Pop culture does not frequently depict women of color realizing their happy ending.

Losing a loved one is never easy.

Legends of the Fall' is one of my favorite movies.

Some people can't handle that I'm direct.

I'm real and honest, and I take things day by day. That's just the way to survive.

So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go.

If you want to explore a political idea in the highest possible way, you embody it in the personal, because that's something that no one can deny.

I love story-writing because I can (more or less, on occasion) actually DO it. That's really the truth. I like the idea that a story is sort of a site for making cool language effects - a site for celebrating language, and, therefore, the world. And the brevity is part of the challenge. I like stories because I get them - I know how to make beauty, or something like beauty, in that mode.

I was raised Catholic,I took from that was a sense of theater and drama, and also the idea that there were truths that couldn't actually be uttered directly but really had to be reached through ritual. You come out of those Masses so moved, and you're like, "Why did that happen?" And the truth of it is that it happened through an hour of highly enacted ritual.

Twitter is a deliberate abstention. Somehow I hate the idea of there always being, in the back of my mind, this little voice saying: 'Oh, I should tweet about this.'

My idea about collections is that you write as hard as you can for some period and what you're really doing during that time is hyper-focusing on the individual pieces - trying to make each one sit up and really do some surprising work.

When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.

When I was a kid, I took 'The Brady Bunch' and 'The Partridge Family' very seriously. It was a world to me in the same way that the Greek myths would have been had I read them. You know, Marcia is Athena and Mr. Brady is Zeus.

I read Rand and thought, "I want to be one of the earth movers, the scientific people who power the world. I don't want to be one of these lisping liberal artsy leeches." So I was working against my actual abilities.

The great American denial riff is that you can do whatever you like and you always triumph at the end. The world is saying no, you can do what you like, but there are consequences. And maturity is to be able to turn to the consequences and accept them.

It's a big world, and I really like it.

New York is so full of the best unemployed actors on the planet.

I think a lot of people are with the one they're meant to be with. I see it watching my parents because they've been together for so long and are still very much in love. I'm just sort of in awe of that.

I want to pick good projects, I want to work with great directors and try not to put too much pressure on myself and just read things for the story and recognize when I'm drawn to something for the right reasons and try to maintain some sanity. Sanity would be good. I'd like to have a little sanity!

During a movie, chemistry is so important, and yet they just assume actors can fake their way through it. That doesn't always work.

I've had heartbreaking auditions where they don't even look at you. You're out before you're in.

What bothers me is our culture's obsession with nudity. It shouldn't be a big deal, but it is. I think this overemphasis with nudity makes actors nervous. There's the worry about seeing one's body dissected, misrepresented, played and replayed on the Internet.

I'd grown up doing children's theater there, and I always imagined myself being artistic director of a children's theater company.

I love the exploration of someone who has such a different background from you. That exploration runs to compassion and to cracking yourself open and creating more understanding of how weird and amazing life is.

You want people to buy you as just about anything. So if they think that you're one thing, it's hard to slip into, you know, all these other things.

With a film, you just don't have time to build sympathy for the character. But I think we're moving away from that in TV. With TV, you have a little more leeway to allow them to rise and fall and rise again and be much more complicated beings.

With any project I work on - not just 'True Detective' - I don't feel the need just to play a strong woman. I don't want the audience to say, 'Oh, she was so strong.' I want to play characters that are flawed and interesting.

I don't really want to repeat myself. For the most part, I always want to be doing something new. But there aren't a lot of gritty roles out there for women, and they are so fun to play, everyone wants them.

I had a lovely childhood. For family holidays, we went as far as the car could take us - we would drive to Florida, even though it would take three days. I didn't know we didn't have a lot of money because there was always food on the table. I didn't have a lot of stuff, but I did figure skating for a long time, and I always had my skates.

I was 12 when it really hit me. I did children's theatre camp during the summers and played a fairy in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' The next summer, I played Clytemnestra in 'Agamemnon' and I was like, 'OK, this is amazing.'

I grew up in a very small town and didn't realise till later that I had an adventurous side. When I went to theatre school at 18, I came into my own and let loose.

It's always disappointing when your work is not received as you hope it would be.

I'm from a very close-knit family, and there was something very... I guess you could say normal, about it, and I so appreciate that. We all ate dinner together every single night, and my mom stayed at home with us. I owe a lot to my parents.

My mother's parents died when I was quite young, so I would like to be able to go back and know those people as an adult.

What I love about film is that everybody often connects to something so different, and things you couldn't anticipate when you were making the film, so you just make it as honest as possible.

When you're playing music through the streets of London at 2 o'clock in the morning, there's something so cool and magical about that. It takes you to a special place very quickly.

I always wanted pink hair.

At nine years old, I was presented an opportunity to move to Toronto to train for pairs dancing. As soon as I heard that that's what it entailed, I was out of there. It's like a past life. I hung up my skates and never looked back.