I guess I've played a lot of victims, but that's what a lot of the history of women is about.

There are 400 billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone. If just one out of a million of those had planets, and just one in a million of those had life, and just one out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there.

I had a prodigious life, living in a grown-up world when I was a child. But I think my abilities were about perceptiveness, and they were about examining psychology and examining people and relationships.

When I was growing up, books took me away from my life to a solitary place that didn't feel lonely. They celebrated the outcasts, people who sat on the margins of society contemplating their interiors. . . Books were my cure for a romanticized unhappiness, for the anxiety of impending adulthood. They were all mine, private islands with secret passwords only the worthy could utter.

I'd prefer not to act in the film I'm directing. I think, though, as an actor, you do learn how to turn things on and off quickly and kind of compartmentalize. You learn to accommodate the camera and the other actors, to notice where the boom is and where you mark is, and be able to repeat something a few times.

I look back at my career when I was younger and can connect what I was going through at the time with the characters I was playing. I see the similarities in them reflecting on my life.

I spent a lot of time not in school, so I didn't have deep relationships with kids my own age.