I still have a lot to learn. I just have two cats, and when I'm in a bad mood - you know, it would be very easy to throw a cat across a room.

As someone who has been asked to ask David Lynch what his movies mean for 25 years, I'm very careful about asking artists what their art means.

I love to rescue animals.... The pounds were so crowded they were putting animals down almost immediately. Seven thousand dogs were put to sleep.

I'm interested in human nature. That's why I chose to become an actor. Whatever people are struggling with, the struggle is often where the drama is.

I really don't consider myself to be a conventional Hollywood star. I've never really been marketed by the big studios to do mass market box office films.

Whatever character you play, it gives you the chance to expose another side of yourself that maybe you've never felt comfortable with, or never knew about

I hope we can be consummate artists as women or revolutionaries, or whatever women want to be, and also have love, not only for ourselves but from a partner.

When you're playing someone who has a strong ego about themselves, you can't play them when you have the opposite opinion of the one they have of themselves.

What about good small roles for women? I've told my agent, if there are two great scenes in a film, I don't care, if it's something with that great edge to it.

It sounds like a cliché, but mother is really one of my closest friends, and so's my dad. He and I weren't very close when I was younger, but now we're best friends.

Whether a movie part comes to me or I seek it out, there's always this journey to darkness through light, or vice versa; that element has been in almost everything I've done.

I like movies about longing and desperation, and dark and light things, stories about people struggling to raise children, and to have relationships and be intimate with each other.

It's very easy to get caught up in - there's a hype going on now that I haven't seen in years, and it's actually more about press than it is about an actor's work or what films they've been in.

I knew you had to go in and audition and maybe they'd hire you, and that's where you start. I had a good understanding about press: that it's the actor's responsibility to publicize his or her films.

I don't care, but I don't get bitter about anything as long as I can work and do the things I love. And it would be a beautiful world if those things I love and that mean something could remain as they are.

Luckily, I was raised by people whod already seen all the yuck stuff, which is why they originally didnt want me to act. I understood the difference between getting a part at a Hollywood party and getting a job.

I went to a Catholic school. The private school was good - the teachers wanted all of us to have the freedom to think for ourselves. The education was good at the Catholic school, but you only got that one ideology.

I want to do a western. Nobody does westerns anymore.

For some reason, my whole life has been, 'You can't do this, you can't do that.'

'What Doesn't Kill You' is a really great movie that was little seen but, I think, is one of my personal favorites.

If you're not yelling at your kids, then you're not spending enough time with them!

Shakespeare does a great job of taking 5,000-year-old stories and turning them into modern pieces that are true to the original essence but are completely remade.

Whatever we want to think about American business - work hard, tell the truth, have morality - it's a myth. There's a lot of graft.

I don't have to be a leading man. I can be a character actor. That's really what interests me anyway.