As things grew for me I felt like I was losing myself and wanted to stay true to myself as well. I didn't want to lose any connection I had with the audience. I felt small on a big stage and I felt like I was peaking generically to an audience.
The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.
I didn't want to whisper and giggle about [puberty] anymore. I felt incredibly self-conscious. I felt like I was losing myself, and I was losing who I was. And that really scared me.
On my first trip to India, my guru took me to an ashram in Allahabad. I felt like I was walking into a place I had been before. It felt like it was my spiritual home.
When I played Hope in 'Booksmart,' I was like, 'I could see myself with a woman.' Because, literally, I was seeing myself with a woman.
I felt a certain modicum of success because I had been paid well to be an actor for the first time in my life, but I felt like I had done adolescent work on the show, and stepping into the New York theater arena was the first time I felt like I'd come into my own. I felt like I was proving myself in a gladiatorial arena.
I think it started since I was born, I always had a need to express myself, you know, as a human being, and I found that it felt right when I expressed myself through art, dance, through acting, so it kind of happened naturally.
I've always felt like an outsider as a woman. I've never really felt wholly comfortable in a women's world or woman's things. I've never been conventionally pretty or thin or girly-girl. Never felt dateable. All I've seen on TV has never felt like mine.
Like everyone else, I've had moments when I've felt that I've been losing my grip.
That first CS class I took, I felt like I was drowning. It's like being taught how to swim by being thrown off deck. The continual self-talk that I have had with myself while I've been here is, pull yourself together and get this done.
I had been doing theater since I was a kid, so the stage really felt like home to me. It felt like the place where I trust myself the most in the world and felt the most confident.
I was so passionate about wanting the role in 'Like Crazy,' I filmed myself in the shower because that's where one of the scenes was set. It just felt instinctive. It was a close up! It would have been strange if I'd sent off a wide shot of myself. That's not the kind of work I want to do!
I literally would go to see Tina Turner any opportunity I had because being in the presence of Tina Turner was like being in the presence of transformative energy, and feminist transformative energy. I remember thinking to myself, whatever this is, it's revolution. Whatever this is, it's change embodied in a woman.
European democracy was originally imbued with a sense of Christian responsibility and self-discipline, but these spiritual principles have been gradually losing their force. Spiritual independence is being pressured on all sides by the dictatorship of self-satisfied vulgarity, of the latest fads, and of group interests.
I moved to Los Angeles when I was about 20, all by myself. It was exciting. I had this moment when I felt like I needed to put on my big-boy pants and just make that leap to see what would happen.
I never heard the expression, "A strong man," unless somebody was in the gym lifting a heavy barbell. Why is there a difference between being an ambitious, driven woman or passionate woman and a passionate man? That is something that has come up a lot.