The highest compliment I could ever receive about my kids - and I can say that this does happen frequently - is when the in-flight crew say to me, 'Your children are wonderful. They are so well-behaved.' Every time I am told that, I could weep.

I will tell you that when I was heavy, people would say to me - and it was such a backhanded compliment - they would say, 'You've got such a beautiful face,' in the way of, like, 'Oh, isn't it a shame that from the neck down you're questionable.'

I'm really happy in my own skin. There's a lot of judgment that can come from outside sometimes, and there's media scrutiny that is placed on a lot of women in the public eye, and I just couldn't care less. I really couldn't care less. 'I would sometimes say in my twenties, 'oh, I couldn't care less', but I think I probably did. Now I genuinely don't and that's a lovely, liberating thing to experience.

Life is short, and it is here to be lived.

Just coming to terms with the fact that I got to play April Wheeler [Revolutionary Road] and Hanna Schmitz [The Reader] in one year, let alone in my lifetime. I'm very, very aware of how rare that is as an opportunity for any one person. I can't tell you how much I've been able to take away from these experiences creatively. I really, really learned so much about acting, about myself... all of those things. It's difficult to talk about the actor's process without sounding like an arrogant asshole but they really were very challenging.

I don't read reviews. Just because that is something that's directly connected to my job. I'm doing this because I love it, not because I'm necessarily looking for approval or anything like that. To me, it seems that reading reviews - whether they're good ones or bad ones - can only sort of force the person to divorce themselves from the reality of what it is they do for a living. So I don't read reviews.

Having been here before and lost to be here and win, I've got to tell you, winning is really a lot better than losing. Really a lot better.