When I took my clothes off in Blue Velvet, I wanted to convey the brutality of sex abuse. I wanted to look like a quartered cow hanging in a butcher shop as well as disturbingly appealing.

The reason of my life is not to be the most beautiful woman in the world.

Food is a big part of my culture, so everyone knows how to cook. When I came to America and asked a babysitter to softboil an egg for my son and she didn't know how, I was shocked.

From the time I was a child I wanted to be like my mother. Not necessarily an actress - I never dreamed I'd have the courage. But an active, volatile woman like she was.

My father used to say that you could only access culture before cinema by learning to read and write, but that once cinema was invented, knowledge was available to anybody.

A lot of the advertisement is done by saying: first of all, have a complex about who you are.

But my mother loved The Elephant Man, and my father gave David Lynch a scholarship to study in Rome.