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When the family gets together once a year in Georgia for New Year's Eve, we listen to music, all kinds of music. That's what we do.
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The unknown makes people uncomfortable. And even living in a city that's as cosmopolitan as New York City is, there's so many things I don't know about other cultures, even though I encounter other cultures - maybe even 18 or 19 of them - when I get on a subway car every day.
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I believe that there is good. I believe there is evil. Do I believe that they come from God who is watching us conduct myriad never-ending wars and looks benignly on because there's higher purpose to all of this? I don't think so.
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I've worked with a lot of female directors over the course of my career: Martha Coolidge, Catherine Hardwicke, Jodie Foster.
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This is one of the reasons I like to act - it's because acting forces you into situations you don't know.
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People think I disappear sporadically, but I just do projects that don't get international acclaim.
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I found acting when I was 14, when I got cast in the chorus in a high school play, 'The Boyfriend.' In my high school, we did mainly musicals, so I just started doing nothing but musicals for years and loved it.
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It's the same with people knowing absolutely everything there is to know about an actor. I actually think the more personal information you have about an actor, the more you have to carve out for yourself when you go to a movie and see them in it.
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'Top Of The Lake' is a great story with a beginning, and a middle and an end, about darkness - it's like the heart of darkness. And everybody has got one. When I was reading it, I couldn't put it down, and I wanted to know what was going to happen next.
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So much progress has been made with topics like mental illness and drug abuse and sexual identity.
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I don't offer advice to actors only because I've seen actors become successful through ways that would never even occur to me or that wouldn't work for me. But this has worked for me: Never memorizing a scene.
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There are, in terms of numbers, more leading roles for women in television than there are features. That's absolutely certain.
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I think Ada in 'The Piano' is the most interior character I've ever had the chance to play, either on the stage or in anything I've done for film or TV.
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There's no way that anyone can know the ebb and flow of one's career. You can't know that. You can tell young actors it's going to be very difficult, but there's no way you can understand the difficulties and the rewards through description. You have to cellularly experience it.
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I would love to work more - I really would - but there is not a lot of stuff around and the stuff that is around is not very complicated; it tends to lie a little flat.
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I'm not religious. I'm not an atheist. Would I say I'm an agnostic? Possibly. But I would say the collective unconscious is something I'm much more interested in.
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A play is a hard thing, particularly in L.A. It's less expensive than in New York, but there's also less of a commitment to people doing plays than in New York. So it's a strange battle.
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I'm almost 60. I've been doing this for a while. In order to do this for that long, you have to make decisions based on lots and lots of different criteria, you know. I mean, the criteria has to shift, especially if you're an actress.
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I wouldn't even go spend the night at a friend's unless they had a piano. But I didn't have the chops, the extraordinary talent, to be able to play the piano professionally.
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What is God, and how do you believe in him - how do you not believe? It's a question the world continues to tussle with. People's beliefs get them in a lot of conflicts.
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Sometimes I go, 'Wow, this is a director I really, really want to work with,' like David Cronenberg. I haunted David Cronenberg for years before, and then he offered me a role.
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I'm not a classically beautiful person, but hopefully it increases my longevity as an actress that my career isn't dependent on my great, great good looks.
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I guess I'm more of a direct person than an indirect one.
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To me, being creative is a very fragile thing. The environment in which one can create is a very particular one, and somehow, I've always felt the need to be very protective of that.