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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 heckled somebody at the U.S. Open once.

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.

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.

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.

The unknown makes people uncomfortable.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.