To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are.

When I was playing Marius in the inaugural production of 'Les Mis,' I contracted glandular fever which developed into a post-viral depression. I was 23 and I couldn't see any light at the end of the tunnel.

I'd rather take the mick out of myself before anyone else does. I know they'll do it, so I'd rather get in there first!

You often take the mick out of the people you like best.

I'm not a big fan of Christmas, and I think there are a lot of people who feel a bit melancholy at the holiday.

We've all sort of been there: It's coming on Christmas, all that preparation is going on, and you just want to escape. You don't want to buy into it. It's a time of year that brings up a lot of memories for people, and if you're missing somebody, it's hardest at this time of year.

I love the genre of early Hollywood. It gives you everything.

Legally we have integration, social acceptance and diversity... but that doesn't mean... everybody is down with 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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