A heart can only discover what it really wants with experience.
My mother used to tell this corny story about how the doctor smacked me on the behind when I was born and I thought it was applause, and I have been looking for it ever since.
I find it safer to pursue the powerful, the ugly, the unpleasant.
I went from years of honing my craft to sudden recognition. It was quite a life changer.
I want to be defined by my own essence.
I look for a role that hopefully I feel empathy with and that I can understand and love, but also that has that challenge for me to play - a different kind of role, a different type of character, a different time period.
I have to pay the bills just like everybody else, but it also pays my soul to work.
I want to see women onscreen the way I see them in society.
I've always tried to be honest, and it would be too difficult for me to develop some kind of persona. I don't have enough time or energy for that.
I was never an ingenue. I've always just been a character actor. When I was younger, it was a real problem, because I was never pretty enough. It was hard, not just for the lack of work, but because you have to face up to how people are looking at you.
We all love to hear a good story. We save our stories in books. We save our books in libraries. Libraries are the storyhouses full of all those stories and secrets.
Now if I go through it again, I think I would be a lot more open about it. I admire people who have been open like Melissa Ethridge and women I see walking around facing it without wigs and all of that stuff. I think I would be more courageous next time.
The bottom line is that I'm an actor, so when somebody pitches me a great part, it's a no-brainer. You never know what it's gonna be like, in terms of the actual experience. You can be really excited about a part that can turn out shitty, you can have a bad time, there's a bad egg or two or three, in the bunch, or the producers are weird, or something like that.
I'm a horror movie fan to begin with, so to come back to the genre, I feel like horror has been very good to me.
And people are always saying: 'Well, you go to Hollywood and you get yourself a film career or a TV series, and then you can do anything you want. Because then you've got the clout.' That had always sounded like a lot of hooey to me, but now I think it's true, unfortunately.
I read Stephen King a lot and I've actually played two roles. Delores Claiborne is my favorite, I think, of any film that I've done.
I didn't go out on one date in high school. I played guitar and sang and wrote my own music and poetry and stuff when I was a teenager.
When I was in New Orleans, I was in a grocery store and a woman came up to me and she said, "Oh, my daughter's such a big fan of the show." And I said, "Can I meet her?" And around the corner came this seven-year-old. I was horrified and I almost said to her, "Lady, what are you doing? [American Horror Story] is not for seven-year-olds, I can tell you."
I can sit here on the couch and hear you say, "You're very feminine and very attractive," but I have always struggled with that.
There are a lot of powerful women in Hollywood who have been movie stars for a long time who are getting into their forties and fifties. I still want to see them work.
I love everything. I love being the empathetic characters. I love being the villains. I think it's like when we're kids, we like to play all kinds of crazy characters and dress up.
Every time an Oscar is given out, an agent gets his wings.
The relationship to the director is becoming more crucial to me, making sure there are some common goals. I haven't been in the kind of position where my roles have been chosen for me, where someone says, "First we'll do this and then we'll do this," and it's all part of some master plan.
Drama comes more naturally to me. It's the comedy you really have to delve into.
I find that I'm fighting to keep my energy and my passion centered on the work and not on "Will this get me an Oscar?" - which is the way people are starting to talk to me. I'm not interested in the way people are starting to talk to me. I'm not interested in looking at a role that way. That's not what I ever did, and it's not how I can continue to do my work.
