I have always loved children. I've been fantasizing about motherhood since I was probably 2 ½. I loved to babysit my cousins, and nieces, you know.

You fail, and then what? Life goes on. It's only when you risk failure that you discover things.

[My mother] always said I was beautiful and I finally believed her at some point.

It's in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person's circumstances and another person's experience.

As human beings, what makes us able to empathize with people is a connection that is not necessarily understood mentally.

I come from a loving, supportive family, and my mother taught me that there are more valuable ways to achieve beauty than just through your external features. She was focused on compassion and respect, and those are the things that ended up translating to me as beauty.

I don't think I will ever be able to really articulate how bizarre it was to hear my name at the Academy Awards. I'd watched in my pajamas the year before! I felt numb - dazed and confused. I remember feeling light - weightless. More like limbo than cloud nine. At first I was like, This is my statue; nobody gets to touch it. And by midnight I was like, Please, someone, take this statue; it's too heavy! So I gave it to my brother, and he went off with it.