"I enjoy doing everything, comedy and drama. I just look for the characters really and what they offer."

"The inherited tradition is that we don't tell stories about slavery from the perspective of the slave. It's told through the president or the lawyer."

"David Mamet was great to work with. He was everything that I thought he would be as a director. He's incredibly articulate, an easy collaborator. Extraordinarily knowledgeable about film and writing."

"I like to disappear into a role. I equate the success of it with a feeling of being chemically changed. That's the only way I can express it."

"You'll never see a good performance out of me, in terms of a character, when the camera isn't rolling."

"The traditional Christian attitude toward human personality was that human nature was essentially good and that it was formed and modified by social pressures and training."

"I am convinced that living in an enclave shapes the personality, and living alone shapes the personality too."

"Sometimes I feel the only way I can get a major publisher interested in mental illness is if I find a character who has bipolar disorder and is also a love-sick vampire attending an English school called Hogwarts. But I'm not giving up."