As a mother trying to raise kids with some kind of a code, an honorable way to solve problems without using violence, I find it interesting to live in a country where your government is allowed to kill, whether it's war or execution. What interests me is not who deserves to die but who deserves to kill.

I believe in using words, not fists.

Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know, what did Iraq do to us?

I think looking at your own life, on- and offscreen, you can motivate anything, or you can delude yourself into anything.

In terms of our foreign policy, that's where we made a mistake after 9/11. Everyone's going, "Why, why, why," and there wasn't any investigation or learning from any of what we had been doing up to that time that had set us up.

I don't like to plan. Very often, for me, acting is like loving; it's using the muscle that you use in loving, in that your heart feels open. Physically, you feel open. And so therefore your job is to enter, open, and listen. And see what happens.

When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.