Audiences like to be made to feel that there is a world where things go right: where big emotions can happen and yet feel safe. This is why there is a constant tension in Hollywood between studios who want happy endings and writers who want to explore the human condition. There is a time and a place for both!
I was kind of excited about going to jail the first time and I learnt some great dialogue.
How does anybody change from the time that they're 18 till they're 25? Everything kind of changes. You see the world much differently, and you get your priorities in order a little bit more.
Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.
By the Declaration of Independence, dreaded by the foes an for a time doubtfully viewed by many of the friends of America, everything stood on a new and more respectable footing, both with regard to the operations of war or negotiations with foreign powers.
I can never believe how much time and energy and money and talent and everything else is being poured into horrible ideas.
I admire those women who really knew who they were and didn't apologize for it. Katharine Hepburn? She was ahead of her time.
I love the way people talk crap. I hear it all the time. 'Overrated.' 'You suck.' I'll just do something to shut them up, like, 'I'll show you.'
In 2008, Barack Obama had all the wind at his back, everything going for him. He was an African-American at a time when the country was eager to do that. The Republicans had, in the view of many of us, pretty much disgraced themselves at home and abroad for eight years.
Each of us, having received several hundred dollars, we passed the time gloriously, spending our money freely - never thinking that our lives were risked gaining it.
I started off as a model and struggled for some time until I got a break as an actress. I was too stubborn to let go and was sure I was in the right place at the right time. I just fought and I think that's how I am where I am today.
We always work at least a month to six weeks before we go on the road, usually for something like eight to 12 hours a night. It took six weeks to do it this time. We just play virtually everything we know.
If I had a great body, I'd be naked all the time.
It's sort of a feeling of power onstage. It's really the ability to make people smile, or just to turn them one way or another for that duration of time, and for it to have some effect later on. I don't really think it's power... it's the goodness.
My dad sung and played piano. But he was also a man of God. He was a minister. So when Sam Cooke would come in town, you know, with The Soul Stirrers at that time, he was singing gospel, they would end up at my dad's church, and it would always be a guest singer for Sunday morning.
I'm really awkward when people recognize me. I'm not good at it, and for the most part it hadn't happened to me until 'True Blood,' and then, all of a sudden, it started happening all the time.
I've never seen anyone - and I've had the opportunity to work with some really terrific actors in my time - but Philip Seymour Hoffman is definitely the best I ever had the opportunity to work with.
For the first time in my life, I want the right to get married. I've met somebody who meets the criteria of what I've always imagined in and wanted from a partner - someone to marry and to bring children into the world with.
I say it in the writers' room all the time: My black is not your black. What's terrifying is that, just the same way we've all accepted that normal is white, everybody seems to buy into the idea that there's only one way to be black or one way to be Hispanic. That's as damaging as anything else.
Many now born, by the time they are voters will compose part of a nation with a genius nowhere equaled, and with a vast territory upon which those energies and that genius can operate.
Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end.
Later, after flying in the Navy for four or five years, spending some time on an aircraft carrier, I applied to and was accepted in a program where I went to graduate school first and then to the Naval Test Pilots School.
Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.
A good joke can spread throughout the Internet between the time you go to bed and the time you wake up, leading to an inbox filled with pictures of funny cats and cheeseburgers.
Modern conveniences grant us more free time to focus on spiritual needs and devote more time to personal service. But the basic element which should never change in the lives of righteous young women is giving service to others.
I've fought to close the gender and racial pay gap for a very long time. One piece of advice I like to give whenever I'm speaking on the subject: if you want equal pay, join a union! I've never seen a union contract that pays women 79 cents to a man's dollar.
I already had three strikes against me. One, I have light skin. Two, I'm from Miami, which wasn't getting looked at at the time. Three, I'm Cuban. But now, I've made everything that stacked against me into a virtue.
Acting is a nice childish profession - pretending you're someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself.
We need to stop fighting Christian against Christian. I have no time for anything but trying to love other people. That is a full-time job.
My Mother is Swedish and my Father is Scottish, he played for Charlton in the 1960's and was in the Army, he captained the British forces team. We then moved to S.A. because a lot of players did that at the time.
The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.
Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
If you believe that you can't do something, then you're not going to do it. If you believe you can, and you're willing to put in the effort and figure out a way to do it, then the majority of the time, you can.
If patience is worth anything, it must endure to the end of time. And a living faith will last in the midst of the blackest storm.
It's a big, big advantage because understanding what changes we might make takes time and it takes time to work out settings and to understand everything about the new machine.
