The work itself is the reward, and if I choose challenging work, it'll pay me back with interest. At least I'll be interested, even if nobody else is.

So yeah, when I was a kid, when I was 16, 17, I'd come home from high school, and my dad collected all of Barbra Streisand's records. And she was very young then. I think she probably had three records out, and she was 21, and we had them all. And I knew every single song, every breath, every elision, every swell. And I sang along to it.

I get nervous calling myself an artist. I feel I'm more like an interpreter or a violinist, you know.

We are who we're going to be when we're very old, and when we're very old we are who we were when we were 8.

I didn't have any confidence in my beauty when I was young. I felt like a character actress, and I still do.

That's my way in the very beginning - how to enter it [a role]. Very quickly in the process, I don't think about voice being separate from the way you hold your head or the way you sit or the way you put on lipstick. It's all a piece of a person, and it's all driven by conviction.

You win an Oscar, it can double the audience that you had before.