I would go into periods of depression in my life, and I would feel so alone. I felt that there was no one who understood how I felt, either on TV or in music, and writing really helped me change what I thought and how I felt about myself.

Whenever you want something that you're not going to get, suddenly the whiney 3-year-old comes out in you.

I think the interesting aspect of life is that you're always sort of in the middle. You're never the youngest and you're never the oldest.

Clothing totally changes my perception of how I feel about myself depending on what it is that I'm wearing.

I think that I write about stuff that others don't write about. I don't have a bunch of love songs cuz I don't really have much boy experience. I just write about what I am actually going through in my real life.

I had started acting when I was 7, and I was always wrong. I would always get to the very end [of the audition], but I wasn't a perfect package of one thing. I wasn't a cliche, and it always worked against me. I wasn't pretty enough to play the popular girl, I wasn't mousy enough to be the mousy girl. Then there was a TV show that Toni Collette was starring in. And when a role to play a girl who was struggling with identity came, I thought: "Oh, this is what I was supposed to do. Everything's leading up to this moment." I was 18. I was like, "This is it." I didn't get it. And I was devastated.

One of the reasons I love making movies is because it's an opportunity to share with the world a different way of being or a different way of living or seeing the world. If it's something you've already seen before, if I have too many reference points for it, then it's not exciting for me to make.