It doesn't escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else's.

I never, in my wildest dreams, could I have thought that the first role I get out of school would lead to an Oscar nomination.

I've always had that going on: "I can't," and then I do, so the voice says, "Well, that was an exception!" It's a tug-of-war between two voices: the one who knows she can and the one who's scared she can't.

I have a very ostrich mentality. I feel like I have my head in the sand so no one can see me.

I remember in my very first fitting, costume designer Patricia Norris gave me a garment with these intricate stitches - stitches over stitches, because it had been repaired so many times. Once I put it on, she told me that it belonged to an actual slave woman. My heart just stopped. Each one of the stitches had a story, you know. Just recognizing this period I was going to be dancing with was a "come to Jesus" moment.

Even in my dreams of being an actor, my dream was not in the celebrity. My dream was in the work that I wanted to do.

We, as human beings, have the capacity for extreme cruelty.