I don't want to spend my life in my 40s feeling bad about being in my 40s, and then all of a sudden I'm 50, and I will have missed a whole decade!

I enjoy learning about different periods and people, and then taking what's universal about the human condition and seeing where it matches up. No matter where you are, certain things unite everybody.

I never felt like a happy-go-lucky ingenue to begin with. And parts are written better when you're older. When you're young, you're written to be an ingenue, and you're written to be a quality. You're actually not written to be a person, you're written for your youth to inspire someone else, usually a man. So I find it just much more liberating.

There's a real passing down in the theater, almost ad nauseam. You have to listen to older people talk about their experience, but it makes you very aware of what has come before you or what is coming after you - that you're a part of a link in a chain. It's not all about you.

It is always good to explore the stuff you don't agree with, to try and understand a different lifestyle or foreign worldview. I like to be challenged in that way, and always end up learning something I didn't know.

Ask "why" until there is no more "why."

History's a resource.