There's almost nothing that hasn't been said about me. But there's an awful lot that I haven't said. I don't talk about private things.
I know that a man who shows me his wealth is like the beggar who shows me his poverty; they are both looking for alms from me, the rich man for the alms of my envy, the poor man for the alms of my guilt.
When I start a picture, I always have a script, but I change it every day. I put in what occurs to me that day out of my imagination. You start on a voyage; you know where you will end up but not what will occur along the way. You want to be surprised.
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
There's never been someone like me in history - a fighter like me only comes along every 1,000 years.
For me, already being part of a single parent household and knowing it was just me and my mom, you'd would wake up times and hope that the next day you'd be able to be alongside your mother because she was out trying to make sure that I was taken care of. But all I cared about was her being home.
Had I done the movies that were offered to me in my prime, at the height of my career, I would have been alongside the likes of Denzel Washington. But, I chose not to do those movies.
I have a partner who can be there alongside me, who's taking up a huge part of that joint responsibility, because he's a parent, too - he's not a babysitter.
When I was working on Eye of the Beholder, I played a character who is so aloof that my whole lifestyle became very aloof. If someone knocked on my door, there was a part of me that went into a rage, because I wanted to be isolated and alone.
People tell me all the time that I look forbidding or aloof. That doesn't bother me much - I am fairly private, withdrawn, and... distant, I guess. But, um, I think that's okay.
Being professional makes it easier for me to say no, be honest, and not feel bad about it. However, that doesn't mean that you stay aloof.
Right right, because up to that point I had not been a viewer, and I didn't know alot about the show, it was all new to me and the cast members were wonderful!
People wonder aloud about whether I am an okay mother. That is obviously painful because it's so important to me. It's hard to hear that people think I'm not a capable mother and a good person, that they just think I'm nuts.
I surrendered to a world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.
I think the reason I'm a writer is because first, I was a reader. I loved to read. I read a lot of adventure stories and mystery books, and I have wonderful memories of my mom reading picture books aloud to me. I learned that words are powerful.
My earliest memory of books is not of reading but of being read to. I spent hours listening, watching the face of the person reading aloud to me.
It's never occurred to me - and I don't know what right mixture of upbringing this was - that my opinion wasn't as important as the alpha males or that I shouldn't try or that I wasn't the funniest one in the room.
In films, I didn't crave the type of attention I had sort of stumbled into in my music career. And I do not audition well. I'm really not good at it. Early on, I did movies like 'Alpha Dog' and 'Black Snake Moan' because the directors didn't ask me to audition.
I never expected I would be connected to the Alpha male as some kind of ancillary object, and to this day it mystifies me.
I drove from Naples to the Amalfi coast in an Alpha Romeo 1969 Spider, which was lovely. There have been lots of movies made down there, and I felt a bit like James Bond - the driving is quite hairy. The locals have mopeds, but you wouldn't catch me on a bike on those roads. A tank would be safer!
