At 30 I thought my life was over. I thought I'd have made something of myself by then, that life would somehow have made the necessary arrangements - but actually I had nothing.
I never make a distinction between private life and politics - that's a petit bourgeois thing. How can you make a stand against Nazi Germany, or in Rwanda, when you live life by making that distinction?
As I look back over my life, before I had any real identity, I was a traveler. I grew up an Army brat, a runaway, an activist, and a musician. All my life I've been traveling.
Acting is always at the core of my life, but I'm also excited about producing. I'm excited about directing, and I have a life in the filmmaking world, and so I want to explore all aspects of it, not just the acting, but acting is the root.
I don't have anything interesting to conceal or reveal in my private life, and it is really only my work and professional life that I want to talk about.
In India, there's a way of seeing life as a cosmic play. It's called Lila. I can watch my life, and I can see my guru playing with me.
When I was a teenager in Milwaukee in the 1980s, life was pretty boring, and I found myself riveted by the sheer melodrama of everyday life of the 1960s.
No matter how much we try to run away from this thirst for the answer to life, for the meaning of life, the intensity only gets stronger and stronger. We cannot escape these spiritual hungers.
There was a combination of not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, but also really not wanting to be stuck in Lord of the Rings for the rest of my life, and being desperate to kind of make sure that I could do something else with my life.
I have definitely had experiences where I can feel the shift from simply living my life to being slightly outside of my life and taking notes.
Acting can be a very reactive profession. Acting is a fantastic thing, and it's my life, but writing is also part of me too, so I did it, and in so doing, took responsibility for my own life.
I've told lots of lies in my life. I try not to lie, but I still do. It's very difficult to get to 37 and not be ashamed of something you've done. But I think your life is easier, ultimately, if you're honest.
You can't embrace your whole life if you're shut down. I found out that I can't just run away and shut down. I'm losing the rest of my life doing that.
It's so disappointing, to put it mildly, that people know so much about my life. Because it means that they're always trying to look at my books in terms of my life.
I'm inhabiting a life I'm not supposed to be in... and at certain times in my life, I have felt a wrongness. And not a moral wrongness but a sense that this isn't what I was born to be doing.
Yes, you can lose somebody overnight, yes, your whole life can be turned upside down. Life is short. It can come and go like a feather in the wind.
Despite my mother saying I have been destined to be an actress my whole life, I remember being the kid who grew up not knowing what I wanted to do with my life.
I got a lot of paradoxes in my life. I guess I'm a real confused person, but there are some focused parts to my life now, and I'm slowly trying to put all the pieces back together.
When I was 20, journalists would ask me what I would do when I retire from waterpolo. For me this is not just a five- or ten-year-period in my life. This is life itself.
I don't mind being, in the public context, referred to as the inventor of the World Wide Web. What I like is that image to be separate from private life, because celebrity damages private life.
There were a lot of little triggers that made me realize that life is now; life is happening while we're preoccupied with stupidities. Of course, growing. Of course, becoming a mother and understanding life from another perspective.
