I have my own high standards for what I want in a partner and how I want to be treated. I bring a lot to the table. I'm not talking about material things but what I have to offer as a person - love and loyalty and all the things that make a good relationship.

I love a massage and a bath. I don't drink - I'll have a sip, but I've never been drunk - and I don't smoke. I envy people who have those releases. They just have a drink or a cigarette, and they feel better. I have to brave it through the whole day on my own.

We as human beings do this thing where we stuff down our feelings until they find a way to manifest themselves. We try to avoid them until there's no more room and they come bubbling up like a pot of boiling-hot water that overflows. And when it does, it burns.

Everything I wanted before, I want twice as much now. And that doesn't mean material things; it means to explore more, to think more. Being an artist doesn't start because you're 21, and it doesn't end because you're 51. You are who you are until the day you die.

Getting back into shape [after bringing twing] was challenging, like it is for anybody who has a baby. The first few pounds drop off really fast. And then you're like stuck with those last 10 to 20 pounds, let's say, and then you've really got to get disciplined.

The best part of having two babies at once, a son and a daughter, is mostly everything. You're just having that feeling of love inside you all the time and motherhood is such a fulfilling place to be. I kind of wish it would have happened to me earlier in my life.

All of a sudden one day I was like, I'm good at this! Oh, man! People are not giving me jobs because they feel sorry for me! I am an actress. I am a singer. I am a performer. That's what I do! Once I started giving myself a little credit, the whole world opened up.

When it's easy, it's great. But when something bad happens is when you really learn. It causes self-examination, it causes you to take a look at yourself. You naturally start analyzing. It's not that you're wrong; it's that sometimes you just need to make adjustments.

If you kiss on the first date and it's not right, then there will be no second date. Sometimes it's better to hold out and not kiss for a long time. I am a strong believer in kissing being very intimate, and the minute you kiss, the floodgates open for everything else.

I love what I do. I have an insatiable appetite for creating things and wanting to get better at what I do and always growing and never stopping. I don't know. It's something I was born with. It's definitely a drive. It's a passion, and it's driven for a love for what I do.

People assume I'm out there having this great life, but money doesn't erase the pain. When you're young you barrel through life, making choices without thinking of repercussions. A few years down the line, you wake up in a certain place and wonder how the hell you got there.

I'd be stupid not to take into consideration that there are certain things people will not consider me for because my name is Lopez. And I know I can do any kind of role. I don't want anybody to say, Oh, she can't pull this off. So those are barriers that you have to overcome.

I always knew I wanted to be a performer, and my mother started taking me to dance classes when I was five. My mother is a teacher, my father works at an insurance company. When I said I wanted to be a performer, people went, "Yeah, right." You don't do that where I come from.

I watched my parents. My dad worked nights, and I was aware of how much he was doing for us. My mom was a Tupperware lady and also worked at the school. I always felt that I couldn't let them down. And I had a natural discipline from early on. I was always training for something.

I'm bad at a ton of things. I'm bad at sitting still. I'm bad at basketball. My worst habit is that while people are talking, I will already be thinking three other things. It's rude. Sometimes if the person is very in tune and they notice, they're like "Where are you right now?"

I love a long bath. I love anything creative. I love decorating. I even love just flipping through magazines and vegging out for a while. But I'm also one of those people who loves to work, so I'll sing, dance, work on my next performance, or write whomever it may be about a new idea.

I always joke about letting the haters motivate you. Everybody has that in their life, people who doubt them or make them feel less than they are. It just takes faith and belief in yourself, and you've got to dig deep into that. That has to come from you - nobody's going to give you that.

As you get older and as you experience and go through different things you realize you have to set boundaries. You have to for your life. You have to say this is OK and this is not OK. This is what I do for a living and this is my life. It's the only one I get and so I have to set boundaries.

In the past, love for me has always meant forever, and sure, you still nurse some of those fantasies, but I don't try to force it anymore. I hung on to my fairy-tale ideals for a long time. But where I am now, what I've been through, there are no rules. There are lots of ways it can turn out.

My philosophy on life is that we're here to love and to learn. And I've learned a lot, so I can't say "I wish this didn't happen or I didn't make that movie." And I take responsibility for being open [about relationships] in the past. I have to, and now I'm doing what I can to make it different.

I've always had a huge fear of dying or becoming ill. The thing I'm most afraid of, though, is being alone, which I think a lot of performers fear. It's why we seek the limelight - so we're not alone, were adored. Were loved, so people want to be around us. The fear of being alone drives my life.

I'm not J.Lo, she's not a real person. She was just a bit of fun that got really crazy. I've never been anyone but Jennifer. I was going to call the album Call Me Jennifer because that would be my way of saying goodbye to the whole J.Lo thing. But Rebirth is perfect because it means so much more.

I've always had a huge fear of dying or becoming ill. The thing I'm most afraid of, though, is being alone, which I think a lot of performers fear. It's why we seek the limelight - so we're not alone, were adored. We're loved, so people want to be around us. The fear of being alone drives my life.

We had our moment [with Marc Anthony] in the third or fourth year that we were married, when we did everything together: We did "El Cantante," we did the tour, we made all the music together, he produced my album [2007's Spanish-language "Como Ama una Mujer"]. That was a really beautiful time for us.

I can't help but be a different person now that I've had kids. That really does change your whole perspective on life for the better. I definitely feel like I've grown up. So, I guess in a way parts of me are going to be different, but in general I'm still the same girl from the Bronx who had big dreams.

Men really disgust me if they don't have a nice smile, nice lips and nice teeth...They have too many disgusting habits - like scratching themselves all the time. And it's really weird how guys think that passing gas is the funniest thing in the world. They love to do that thing in front of girls and laugh about it.

When something bad happens is when you really learn. It causes self-examination, it causes you to take a look at yourself. You naturally start analyzing. It's not that you're wrong; it's that sometimes you just need to make adjustments. Change your way of thinking, change your way of doing, change your way of choosing.

You get to a point in life where it suddenly occurs to you that you don't need all the things you once thought you did--that it's really, well, convoluted. My life feels overblown sometimes, and I don't want it to be. I want it to be streamlined. So I'm living a much more unscripted life now than I have in a long time.

Beauty is only skin deep. I think what's really important is finding a balance of mind, body and spirit. Someone said to me not too long ago, "Until you're twenty, you have the face you are born with, and after that you have the face you deserve", and I really loved that - the idea that you wear who you are on your face.

I love seeing the Oscar films and epic dramas. But I'd rather watch a romantic comedy than any other kind of movie. There's something about movies like these that make you feel so good and happy and that you want to live in that world -- to be that girl and be part of the fairy tale. I have always believed in fairy tales.

I've never done a kissing scene with someone even when you're friends. I mean that sort of even makes it weirder. If you don't know them or like them at all, you can kind of put some weird like ... I don't know. It's the strangest thing. Look at the person next to you and imagine making out with them now, while I film it.

I think everything needs to be played real, for reality's sake, for truth. And that is the drama and the comedy. When you do that, it's funnier. And when you do that, you really do hit the emotional beats. I do it the same way as I do a drama. I just play it for truth, and then maybe have a little bit of fun with it sometimes.

I seriously feel like the best days are ahead, and I like the idea of getting to do everything I did before but with more knowledge, experience, and street smarts. There's a certain love, appreciation, and gratitude that you have at 40 that you don't have when you're younger, and it makes every accomplishment feel so much better.

When you're younger, you don't realize you have limitations and that you are the one who has to take care of yourself. Nobody else is going to do it for you. And so, with all of that time, maturity and realizations, I'm in a much better place to be the best that I've ever been and to continue growing as a person and as an artist.

I just thought that a naked pregnant woman checking herself out would be so funny. I actually wish there was more of it. An actually, it was my idea to put it in, because I just remember being pregnant and just marveling at the hugeness of my body, like looking in the mirror from all angles. But that's something you do privately.

In my mind I first felt like, Oh, I'll be back to work right after the babies are born. But then you don't want to. Even now, it's very difficult for me to leave them in the morning. It just tortures me. I'm like, It's been hours; are they wondering where I am? Do they know that I love them so much and I'm thinking only about them?

When I first started on television, people, and even my own manager at the time, would tell me I had to make all of these changes. But you have to stand up and say, 'There's nothing wrong with me or my shape or who I am; you're the one with the problem!' And when you can really believe that, all of a sudden other people start believing, too.

Because the truth is, nobody knows what's best for you better than you do. You have to really sit still and ask yourself: What do I want? Does this feel right? What should I do? I realized I had to go back and do what I had always done. Listening to my gut was just as important as listening to the advice of others, and only I knew what was best for me.

Obviously no parent does everything right. It's this weird thing that happens where you are striving to be as good as you can be so that they turn out well. And that requires that you be a really great, evolved, aware person in every moment. Which is pretty awesome. But it's also putting tremendous pressure on yourself--which is why women feel so guilty!

I'm deeply grateful to live and work in this country and to the United States for opening its arms to me the way it has. I mean I think my attitude as an Aussie coming here - I've been coming here for a while now, I've been coming here for about 12 or 13 years - is that this country has afforded me and my family work and security. For that, I'm forever grateful.

It's not that I didn't love myself before. Sometimes we don't realize that we are compromising ourselves. To understand that a person is not good for you, or that that person is not treating you in the right way, or that he is not doing the right thing for himself - if I stay, then I am not doing the right thing for me. I love myself enough to walk away from that now.

Honestly, I have s much respect for single moms or anybody who finds themselves a single mother, but to even choose to be single mother is just so courageous to me. It is such a hard job to raise a child and be everything to that child without a partner. It's just admirable and courageous and brave and every other valiant word I can think of. I don't know if I could do it on my own.

I feel like, when we're kids, you're sold into this fairy tale of what love is. That Prince Charming's gonna come along and save you and you're gonna live happily ever after. They're gonna rescue me from the Bronx, and we're gonna go off and live in a castle somewhere and it's gonna be awesome. He's gonna love me forever, and I'm gonna love him forever, and it's gonna be real easy. And it's so different than that.

Confidence: It's the difference between the girl with the perfect body in a one-piece bathing suit, pulling at it and thinking she's not thin enough or doesn't have big enough boobs - and the girl who people call a bit overweight, but meanwhile, she's wearing a bikini and guys are saying, "God, she's sexy." It all has to do with how you feel about yourself - it's about projecting the attitude, I'm OK with who I am.

Getting to play the part of Selena was life-changing for me, i got to immerse myself in her life, got to know her family, her home, her culture ... every part of her story. It was a special time in my life both professionally and personally. Playing her not only opened doors for me in the film world, but it inspired me to start my own music career. In a lot of ways, I wouldn't be where I am today if I hadn't had that experience.

I've always been asked the question, "What is it with Australian men?" It's weird because most of my friends here [in the United States] are American men. I think there's cultural differences. It's a really American thing to kind of wax your chest. As a man it's like, "Get rid of that unsightly hair!" In Australia it's like, "Mate, what are you doing? Why would you do that? Doesn't that hurt?" So there's a few little differences that keep us.

[Having perosonal trainer for the movie 'The back-up plan'] I felt like I had just given birth. He was like, "You can't eat anything but this. You've got to do what I say." So along with doing the film, I did this kind of disciplined workout regimen, because every cheese farmer is ripped and buff, and I wanted to be true to character, because I'm Method. But it took a lot of hard work to get there. You can rest assured in the fact that it's all gone now.

Where you really have your eggs in one basket and that breach happens and you know you should go but you're still in love and you just don't know what to do. It hits you because it's not like -- you're a cheater, and a liar, and I hate you, and you're no good, and I'm leaving. It's not that. It's like, I'm tormented. Even though you've done this and I know it, I still don't know what to do. I know I should go, but I don't want to. And that's why it's such a f***ed-up thing.

It was easy to blame other people for treating me in ways I didn't like, but now I was seeing that I was the one at fault. The only way you can be mistreated is by allowing yourself to be mistreated, and that was something I did over and over again. Somehow, I needed to find that glimmer of self-respect, buried deep inside, that would allow me to say: I am never going to let that happen to me again. I needed to learn how to stand up for myself in a different way, but I didn't know how.

What you realize is it's not about financial success as an artist. A lot of actors and actresses, producers, writers, and the creative people in the business realize that. It's not about that. Yeah, we all want to be successful, but we all just want to create and we want to tell the stories. We want to continue creating the opportunities to be able to continue doing what we love. So, at the end of the day, I feel like it's a win-win for everybody to be able to make these independent films.

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