From a young age, I felt like I was supposed to be the sort of female who is doing something strong.
The great thing about scenes that involve nervous breakdowns - in the little experience I have doing them - is that there's no way to craft it. You just have to do it, and it sort of crafts itself in just being incredibly messy.
Strive to be authentic all the time. That's sort of my philosophy on life, which applies to acting.
The difficulty of looking at a system like natural selection if you have any sort of moral sense yourself, is almost what makes it beautiful.
Syria and Iran have always had a pretty tight relationship, and it looks to me like they just cooked up a press release to put out to sort of restate the obvious. They're both problem countries; we know that. And this doesn't change anything.
I feel like a part of my role being a musician and part of why I want to be a musician is to show women an alternative to sort of the cultural norms, the stereotypes of what we're supposed to be, demure and quiet and motherly.
I do like to cook; I'm sort of a mad scientist in the kitchen.
I always think the recipe for success for a game or any sort of a fantasy experience is to think of a character that hasn't really been explored before, who is unique and has special abilities that not everybody has, and plop them into whatever is the most interesting situation to plop them into.
What will become compellingly important is absolute clarity of shared purpose and set of principles of conduct sort of institutional genetic code that every member of the organization understands in a common way, and with deep conviction.
I want to write, I want to sing. I want to do the same thing for others, have my music, hopefully do that for others one day, not realizing what I sort of had to climb. I had an idea a little bit, but I think that I underestimated the whole thing.
My sister and I used to act as maids and waitresses at my great aunt and uncle's cocktail parties, which were very much sort of retired, minor stars of the Yiddish theater and the Yiddish opera.
Almost every college playwright or sketch or improv comedian was sort of aware of Christopher Durang - even kids in high school. His short plays were so accessible to younger people and I think that was inspirational to me.
Then I think the sense of it being one community breaks down; but if you know instantly and respond within twenty-four hours, it's a very different sort of situation.
Long ago, I had to sort of learn to have a thick skin to read some of the things you read in the papers and to also keep my ego in check when you read some really flattering things in the papers.
Sustainability can't be like some sort of a moral sacrifice or political dilemma or a philanthropical cause. It has to be a design challenge.
The Amish like to live a very plain lifestyle, the way they think God intended. It sort of brings you back to, like, 'Little House on the Prairie' days or something.
I remember that when I got to NYU, everyone was writing scripts. But I was 18 at the time, and when you write a script, so much of it is about what you pull from life, and this sounds sort of cheesy, but I felt like I didn't have enough life experience at that point to write a movie.
I sort of write onstage. I'll throw an idea out there, like Home Depot, and just start talking about it.
You don't have any communication between the Israelis and the Iranians. You have all sorts of local triggers for conflict. Having countries act on a hair trigger - where they can't afford to be second to strike - the potential for a miscalculation or a nuclear war through inadvertence is simply too high.
Because I've never had any higher education of any sort, I've never held in awe those who have had it or have a sense of superiority over those who don't.
I've had an advantage; I've had a sort of open public acceptance in New York that doesn't happen to just anyone trying to make the transition you were talking about.
No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle and good, without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.
To be a carpenter or a builder or a home inspector, you have to have that kind of visual brain where you can sort of imagine something taken apart.
I'm the sort of actor who likes to talk about what we're going to do.
It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.
JFK used to say the bishops and the cardinals were all Republicans, but the nuns were Democrats! I sort of believe that too.
Sometimes when you do a part, the wall between you and the characters can be very porous. You can sort of move in and out of your character's persona and being. And that just couldn't happen on this one because of working with him.
I look upon indolence as a sort of suicide; for the man is effectually destroyed, though the appetites of the brute may survive.
I think Stalin was afraid of Roosevelt. Whenever Roosevelt spoke, he sort of watched him with a certain awe. He was afraid of Roosevelt's influence in the world.
Writers are always sort of threatening to direct, and sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't.
The pop world is cool, but I never really thought of myself as part of it or wanting to be a part of it because I'm on a label that's not really like that. They're not trying to dress me up, they're not trying to do things like that. I feel like I'm sort of separate from that, actually.
As an actor, I'm my own worst critic, but after awhile, really, when you watch 'Moonrise Kingdom', it's such a fantastic film that you sort of get sucked into the story, and then you kind of forget about everything else.
I think that quite often you can only find a choice between bad and worse. But I think it's worth making the effort, and I like to expose my characters to that sort of situation.
I was a class clown. My father was a class clown. My son has been a class clown, and it sort of ran in the family.
If you're getting different prescriptions from different doctors, there has to be some sort of check and balance in there somewhere.
I've always been a very outdoors sort of girl. I'm more a tomboy than a girly girl.
