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

I can't stand most things that I see.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I couldn't care less about fashion. If I had taken any clothes home, they would have remained in my closet for the rest of their existence.

Show business has been really, really good to me because I can work and take a lot of time off, and I'm extremely undisciplined person.

Service is the only thing that's important about love. Everybody is worried about 'losing yourself' - all this narcissism. Duty. We can't stand that idea now either... But duty might be a suit of armor you put on to fight for your love.

I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.

Chris Cooper is one of my favorite actors in the world. I've seen him in most everything he's done.

Sometimes with my children, I remember exactly how I felt as the child in this situation, not just how it feels to be me.

I need to go where people are serious about acting.

I'm never so sure as I was in my mid-20s.

You can't strategize falling in love, can you? It's never worked. People love you the most and set you up, and it doesn't work because you can't predict these things. You fall in love serially.

I'm thrilled when I get nominated. I don't count how many and I don't remember how many I've had. I just know it's a lot.

My feeling about fears is, if you voice your fears, they may come true. I'm superstitious enough to believe that.

If I am not confident that I can portray the character perfectly on screen, I won't even try.

Hillary Clinton has taken some fire over 40 years of her fight for families and children. How does she do it? That's what I want to know. Where does she get her grit and her grace? Where do any of our female firsts, our pathbreakers, where do they find that strength?

There's no road map on how to raise a family: it's always an enormous negotiation.

The aggregate of everybody's emotion, it's such a powerful thing. You can see it in the Trump rallies, where people - I just know, in their living rooms, would be better people - are driven to the worst possibilities by the bloodlust in a crowd. It just gets ginned up, and they're outside of themselves.

I think the most liberating thing I did early on was to free myself from any concern with my looks as they pertained to my work.