My father was a minister, and it was more my mother that had the responsibility of making sure the family put out an outward of appearance of living what he was preaching. She was the PR.

My son smelled like a cinnamon bun, and that smell entered into my biological being, and it became an imperative that I keep him alive at all costs, so then there's this monster - this tiger or lion - that comes forward in you to protect them. And it doesn't stop. It doesn't matter if they become men or women.

We wrote 'Olive Kitteridge' as six hours, and they asked us to make it in four.

I've always known that I'll have a career for the rest of my life because they'll always make movies about men, and men need women in their lives. But, when it comes to telling a woman's story, they're complex, circular, and not genre-driven.

I like being my age. I kind of have a political thing about it.

I'm really interested in playing my age.

I learned how to read in second grade, and I entered a summer contest at my local library in Chattanooga, Tennessee. If you read more books than anybody else, you got your Polaroid up on the bulletin board, and I did.

I'm not really interested in promoting 'Olive' as a series about depression or mental illness.

The last scene in 'Moonlight,' that's one of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen on film in my lifetime. You see two men showing such tenderness towards each other. And it's bold; it's deep. It's complex. It's profound.

There's something healing about tears.

It could be partly my taste. It's just my belief that there are female characters that will benefit from not being vulnerable.

I think that cosmetic enhancements in my profession are just an occupational hazard. But I think, more culturally, I'm interested in starting the conversation about aging gracefully and how, instead of making it a cultural problem, we make it individuals' problems.

I think that ageism is a cultural illness; it's not a personal illness.

In comparison to other women in the world, perhaps I'm seen as smaller. But I've never had a problem thinking of myself as a large woman.

Female characters in literature are full. They're messy: they've got runny noses and burp and belch. Unfortunately, in film, female characters don't often have that kind of richness.

Guess what? I am an ordinary person.

It was really fascinating for everyone involved in 'Fargo' that Marge Gunderson became the iconic character she did. I think it was something about the cultural zeitgeist and what was happening with women in the workplace.

I have a very short attention span.

I buy books, I have shelves of books. I love to read.

I read books. Remember those? I read them, on paper.

I am not a director or a writer, but a filmmaker.

Long-format television is a better way to tell a female story.

Unless I'm on a stage, I don't want to be the event in someone's day.

Here's what I have at my advantage: I've never been a personality. I've always been a character actor.