Having been let out of the barn once, I know I wouldn't be happy if I were home all the time.

Leave me to the thing I love. I love acting. But being called 'the greatest living actress' - a designation not even my mother would sanction - is the opposite of good or valuable or useful. It is a curse for a working actor.

I don't know very much about, honestly, about the Middle East, and yet I've played a lot of different people from a lot of different cultures. The thing that I notice is that we're all - there is a core of humanity that travels right through every culture. And, after all, we're all from Africa originally.

I know what I do and what it means to me and where its sources lie, and that's mine. It still is mine.

Everything we say signifies; everything counts, that we put out into the world. It impacts on kids, it impacts on the zeitgeist of the time.

I go to a lot of movies where people are all around me laughing, and I feel like I'm from outer space because I find it dangerous and stupid and horrible and degrading to women and all these things.

I can't stand most things that I see.

My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.

I know movies are a function of our dream world. And when you project yourself on screen, it's easier to project yourself into what you were, not what you are.

I remember, as I was hovering around 40, I thought each movie would be my last, really.

Nobody can swashbuckle a quick-witted riposte like Emma Thompson. She's a writer, a real writer, and she has a relish for the well-chosen word.

The work is the most fun; it seems illicit how much fun it is.

It's amazing how easily people are led to fury and chaos. Unhappy people with guns are not going to make this country great.

Interestingly, young people don't come to you for advice. Especially the ones who are related to you.

The progression of roles you take strings together a portrait of an actor, but it's a completely random process.

There are improbable things suspended in space, like the earth.

For me, clothes are kind of character; I don't follow fashion or understand trends.

I'm older. There's some sort of seniority. As a matter of fact, the seniority ebbs as you get older.

I get a trickling few scripts that I'm lucky enough that some of them are great. I don't get loads of scripts.

I am a humanist. I am for nice, easy balance.

I have a very clear understanding of what my voice is. It's like a B voice. It hovers around B-minus, B-plus. I have great friends who are wonderful singers, and I know I'll never be able to do that. But singing through a character is something I can do.

I had this sort of idolatry for certain actors who preceded me, people who inspired me, so I'm honored to be that way for young actors.

I have a holistic need to work and to have huge ties of love in my life. I can't imagine eschewing one for the other.

I'm a pain in the ass to all of the costume designers with whom I work because I have very strong feelings about the subject.

It is well that the earth is round that we do not see too far ahead.

Men should look at the world as if something is wrong when their voices predominate. They should feel it.

I don't like to be gone all weekend and at night too. Because for 20 years, I've had children who are in school.

I'm all over the place.

My family really does come first. It always did and always will.

I have a very busy life, and not many people who have a career and four kids go out a lot to the movies.

You win an Oscar, it can double the audience that you had before.

The more you are in this business, the more humbled by it you become.

I have four to five months, tops, per year to give to my acting work.

All that attention to the perfect lighting, the perfect this, the perfect that, I find terribly annoying.

People say, When you have children, everything changes. But maybe things are awakened that were already there.

We are who we're going to be when we're very old, and when we're very old we are who we were when we were 8.

The reason I chose the movies that I did was based on where they were being filmed.

Enough people write about me every day without even interviewing me.

America doesn't reward people of my age, either in day-to-day life or for their performances.

Every single decision I make about what material I do, what I'm putting out in the world, is because of my children.

I have a pretty good idea of what I am not good at and have it front and centre of my consciousness every minute I am doing it.

I didn't really like opera. I liked cheerleading and boys and, later, smoking. So my opera career was cut short when I was 15. My dad got sick, and we couldn't afford the lessons, so I stopped and became a cheerleader and wrecked my voice.

I think I'm not a natural performer; I think I'm an actor.

People at agencies and studios, including the parent boards, might look around the table at the decision-making level and feel something is wrong if half their participants are not women. Because our tastes are different, what we value is different. Not better, different.

Disney, who brought joy, arguably, to billions of people, was, perhaps, or had some... racist proclivities. He formed and supported an anti-Semitic industry lobby. And he was certainly, on the evidence of his company's policies, a gender bigot.

I can't do a lot of things, like golf. I don't like golf. I mean, I really don't, because I tend to like things that I can do right away. If I can't do it right away, I don't like it.

I think you have to listen to the people who are deeply unhappy. You have to find the source of it and not overreact to the craziness in it.

When I was a kid, when I was 16, 17, I'd come home from high school, and my dad collected all of Barbra Streisand's records. And she was very young then. I think she probably had three records out, and she was 21, and we had them all. And I knew every single song, every breath, every elision, every swell. And I sang along to it.