Being a waitress can be a very brutal job sometimes, and I remember during the training, the person said to me, "The redder the lips, the better the tips," and that was like the only advice she gave me.

What I like about acting is that you have to be super, super present in the moment. That's not something that comes to me naturally. But if you take the long view on anything, nothing can really affect you or knock you down. It's like, we're here for a blink, we're just the human experiment, one of many experiments going on in the universe, and it's interesting, it's beautiful by fits and starts, but I can't take it that personally. I'm just one of billions of people attempting.

So at some point you realize that your life is not just going to start one day in the future, that you're living it.

I feel like I'm a much better person when I'm developing my imagination and my innocence and my vulnerability. I like that version of me better than the version where I'm just working on my analytical mind.

I couldn't be a novelist for instance. It feels like a very lonely endeavor. I don't know that I could survive the solitude of that.

I think the first thing I thought when I got out to L.A. was just: Oh, if I want to act, I have to find a different way to go about it because the parts for girls are as dispiriting as the banking jobs. You have to really be willing to invent, I guess, a different path for yourself.

It doesn't happen all the time, but in the moments where you really lose yourself and you fall into this character, it's like time travel.