I never wanted to be an actor. My dad was an actor, and he never brought joy home, so I didn't view it as something that I would want to do. But I got fired as a secretary, and then I started studying, I started doing it just to earn money. And it took me a long time to learn to love it. And what I loved was telling a story. I tried to avoid making plays or films that weren't telling a story that I felt was important. I discovered in the process that it makes you more empathic because you have to enter someone else's reality and learn to see through many other people's eyes.

The people who did you wrong or who didn't quite know how to show up, you forgive them. And forgiving them allows you to forgive yourself too.

I'm an assistant storyteller. It's like being a waiter or a gas-station attendant, but I'm waiting on six million people a week, if I'm lucky.

You don't have to have a man! Masturbation is especially useful for older women, because men die sooner than we do. And so: Use it or lose it. It's not critical that every woman wants to stay juiced up. But if they do, it's perfectly fine. It's a lot easier to feel sexy and perform safely when you're flexible and have a certain amount of strength left. If you keep moving - walking, staying strong, doing squats - then having sex is both safer and more pleasurable, and you feel more empowered and better about yourself.

This toxic striving for perfection is a female thing. How many men obsess about being perfect? For men, generally, good enough is good enough.

In this age of remote-controlled pushbutton war, we must all try very, very hard to remain human beings.

Sex and intimacy are not the same: You can have sex all your life and never be intimate with a person. There has to be empathy in the relationship. You have to enjoy seeing through their eyes. When you're with them, you're there and not thinking about what you're gonna do tomorrow.