I wrote a query letter to an editor - a friend of a friend. The editor called me an idiot, told me never to contact an editor directly, and then recommended three literary agents he had worked with before. Laurie Fox was one of them, and I've never l...
I went to Guatemala to help build a school but left wondering what "help" would really look like... I hadn't prepared myself for how humbled I'd feel, or how hard it would be to find my footing when witnessing a cycle of poverty that seemed to defy a...
We may be lost stars in an ocean of constellations on a dark night but do remember we both belong to the same sky. I breathe the same air that you breathe, we both look at the same luminosity above us. You are the music and I am the lyrics." - Elizab...
Open your mind. See the world in all its splendid color. Truly look at the uniqueness of the people around you and cherish the nuances. Before you make judgments of others and their lifestyles, always remember that there are a million ways to live an...
After 'Somewhere' came out, people started to recognize me more. Whenever I was walking down the street, they'd be like, 'Oh, wow - are you Elle Fanning?' Before 'Somewhere,' they asked me if I was Dakota Fanning, because we looked alike, and I'd say...
When I first started acting, I had all these ideals about the kinds of roles I wanted to play, but the reality is that when you do television - and I do a lot of television - you get cast for qualities that you have as a person. So I look for qualiti...
People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if you're fortunate. But happiness is the result of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel aro...
I think that people, despite my law enforcement background, view me as taking these consistently progressive stands, and I think that, philosophically, there is a desire to get at that person. But I think the stands I have taken are totally consisten...
There is a kind of truth in everything, even fairytales. In fact, especially in fairytales... The King understood it as he looked out from the roof of the Temple and saw the clouds flying past and the green fields far beneath him. He knew that some t...
I watch him, enthralled as slowly, like the predator he is, he stalks me in time to the slow sultry beat of the music. He's barefoot, wearing just an untucked white shirt, jeans, and a smoldering look. Nina sings "You're mine" as Christian reaches me...
Rather than studying the most complex form of memory in a very complicated animal, we had to take the most simple form - an implicit form of memory - in a very simple animal. So I began to look around for very simple animals. And I focused in on the ...
I had many moments of disappointment, despondency, and exhaustion, but I always found that by reading the literature and showing up at my lab looking at the data as they emerged day by day and discussing them with my students and postdoctoral fellows...
I sometimes think if I had gone to Oxford or Cambridge and looked like a handsome young guy who could be in an Evelyn Waugh novel or something, I'd be a massive movie star. But there's a longevity to what I do. It's more reliable. Someone isn't decid...
With a face like mine, I'm never going to play a character who conquers the universe, I'm going to play characters who are subject to forces bearing down on them. My career's based on how we are rather than how we wish we were - they get the good-loo...
I believe in destiny Angel. I believe every choice I've made has brought me closer to you. I looked for you for a very long time. I may have fallen from heaven, but I fell for you.
I can remember - I don't want to identify the individual - but a very prominent Democrat, who compared looking at Carter and then Reagan, and then Bush, and observed that many of the people around Carter were totally disloyal to him.
In junior high, I was picked on for being the small skinny kid who enjoyed being in drama. All the drama kids, we were looked at like we were aliens, and people would call us names and say, you know, 'It's stupid to be in drama.' They would say a lot...
This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped 'Not at this addr...
The way that I look at it is that, when we film for eight months straight for a new 'Jackass' movie, I know that I'm going to wind up with at least two broken bones. I don't know when it's going to happen, but you can't contemplate how you're going t...
I always hated when the studios just kind of said that anybody can act. You look at people like Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda - and I'm just talking about the male actors - there aren't a lot who can act. It's a very special talent, and I wish it were r...
Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our ...