The minute we have a pain, we want a diagnosis. So I think the minute we feel love, it's very hard to just let it be. We want to identify it, we want to catalog it, we want to keep the thing and create the environment it happened in. That's where marriage comes from! Let's make an institution out of it!

I always loved working as an actress, but I didn't understand why I couldn't just opt out of being famous. And then I realized you can, and I think I did. And eventually, I came to understand that you can do that and also keep working.

But I never worried about having a child in my 40s, which is unusual - normally, I'm the queen of worry.

I remember the old joke, while women are deciding which schools the kids go to, where you're going to live, how the money's going to be spent, and where your health care is coming from, the men are out standing around the barbecue solving all the big world problems. So I think this is a well known fact and we're not breaking any new ground here.

Writers often have a 'drunk' that is different than anyone else's. That's why it's so insidious and so damning. First of all, because they can write when they're drinking - or they think they can. A lot of writers will tell me - and this is the latest one I've heard - you drink while you're thinking about what to write, but when you actually write, you sober up.

I think it's a great thing that women went out in droves to see Sex and the City movie. I think it's wonderful and I think women have always shown they're looking both to be entertained and challenged in a theatre. I don't think women are afraid of movies that make them think; make them feel sad. The movies that I've been associated with are not exactly Sex and the City but women are leading the way to the theatre on those. They used to call it a date movie where the girl gets to choose.

You've got the whole civil rights movements emanating from the south, you've got the music that came out of the south that is the core of our current music, so for me that thinking comes out of having Dukes of Hazzard thrown in your face: that the south is a bunch of twangy people that I can't understand. So this is, hopefully, part of the movement to restore the south to its proper and rightful place in our nation... which is huge and pervasive. It's not about Texas - I'm not saying Texas doesn't have it's own unique history - but the south has this at its core.