I don't want to be seen as the kind of person who does things and then expects publicity in return. I look at it as, I happen to have the means, I have the energy and I have the passion to do what I want to do.

I got away from comedy because it wasn't being done in the way that I loved and the way that I could do it. It made me sad because I felt like it wasn't appreciated and no one was writing it so, 'I'll abandon it.

I don't like to fly. I've never been a good flyer. I have a lot of friends that have permanent nail marks in their arms... The moaning that comes from me when there is turbulence. It's awkward for everyone around.

I was rejected in school because I didn't look like the big-breasted, beautiful girls. I was awkward and sad. My mother always said, "Be original!" but I didn't understand until I changed to be like everyone else.

The Hollywood I know has allowed me the opportunity after opportunity to keep doing new things and not send me out to pasture. I don't want to go to pasture. It's cold. I'm allergic to grass. And the cows are mean.

I still love being creative. I still love the aspects of working together with great, talented people. But it's a weird dichotomy; I'm being blessed with more opportunities, but I'm going to be taking less of them.

I haven't always acted or reacted in a way that made me proud, but I didn't make that same mistake twice, and I think that's what I love about adversity is that it always reminds me of what's really valuable in life.

I was actually looking at comedies and wondered, 'Why is every comedy for a women a romantic one? I was so done! Then I said, 'Could I look at every script Jim Carrey rejected?' It didn't center around me getting a man.

I realized that being an actor was something I never owned up to, in a weird way. I would be a hostess or a waitress or a house restorer before I would consider myself an actor, because I never thought I was good enough.

I always said if it gets to a point where I really want a child, I would adopt; kids are amazing, so I'm getting the selfish stuff out of my system so when I have them I can say, 'Go, run. I have plenty of money, go play.'

I did love that scene in the movie [ "Our Brand Is Crisis"] because it's like "The Wizard of Oz." You see the backstage action of politics. You have access to see behind the curtain. You see how it's all one big advertisement.

To me, the producing falls into the same as acting. It requires so much time out of your life, and I take it very personally, I realize, so if I do something, it just has to be something I love and I don't want anyone else to do.

I stopped doing romantic comedies. I just stopped. They're terrible. They're bad. They're not funny and so they shouldn't be a romantic comedy because most of the time they're not romantic. They shouldn't be called romantic comedy.

When people are like, 'Life is good,' I go, 'No, life is a series of disastrous moments, painful moments, unexpected moments, and things that will break your heart. And in between those moments, that's when you savor, savor, savor.'

No one has proof that I know of, that a higher power exists, yet a major portion of the world believes in it and relies on it in faith in trust, in what that is. Where is the science in that? And yet you have incredible belief in that.

The thing I remember the most was not understanding why, if you were doing the right thing, then why did people want to kill you? I remember asking my parents, 'Why is it when people are trying to help other people then they're dying?'

To me, true beauty isn't something that will wash off in the shower at the end of the day. It's something that's still there, before you go to bed and wake up in the morning. And, you know, they always say that's inner beauty, but it is.

In our film business, they say it's recession-proof, but there's no such thing. I think what it's done is there's been an increase in demand for high-quality product. If you understand the business side of it, there's a way to balance it.

I've always said that the experience of meeting an artist that you are in awe of and that you hope to create with one day is usually disappointing because you put them up on a pedestal, and then you're like, 'Wow, that's not a nice person.'

Why is marriage the pinnacle for everyone? People get married for the wrong reasons. We need to start looking at different packages, whether it's living together, or being with six partners, or dedicating your life to taking care of flowers.

At this critical time, I am grateful to Sandra Bullock for once again demonstrating her leadership, compassion and belief in our global humanitarian mission. Sandra continues to enable our lifesaving work and is a model for personal generosity.

I was so thankful that I got to go back to comedy and I felt bad that I had abandoned something that I guess I was naturally given and lucky to have an loved all of my life, but didn't love it anymore because I didn't get to do it the right way.

Latinos, Asians, African-Americans, women - we're all trying to find our place in this world of cinema and television and theater. And the great thing with comedy is that most of the time, you could be orange. It doesn't matter, as long you're funny.

People came to my parents' parties because they were going to have fun and, if lucky, our mother would belly dance. What they didn't know was that the hostess made sure every morsel placed in front of them was pure and without anything artificial, no matter what the cost.

I had prepared myself for the second half of my life [to be] filled with other passions that don't include being in front of the camera. And then all of a sudden I got more work and more work and more work. And I went, "Well maybe things have shifted." And I think they have.

I was always longing to do, emotionally and physically, what my male counterparts always got to do. I just felt envious, every time I saw a movie that I was in awe of, and it was usually a male lead. And those kinds of roles weren't available. They just weren't being written.

I think everything is going to be devastatingly sad - when the phone rings, I know somebody in my family's been hurt, somebody's going to die. I'm sure a therapist would go, 'That's not a good way to live,' but every time it's not that bad thing, I'm so thankful and appreciative.

I still think marriage is a goofy institution if you set it up as this institution with a predetermined set of rules. It's unhealthy to have a predisposed expectation of what you think a marriage should be - as this thing at the end of the rainbow. False expectations take away joy.

You're never in control. That - that is the greatest fallacy of the - you know, there's over 200 people that it requires to make a film. And there's people who are in control of how you look, what your performance is, what takes are used, what - you're only in control of how you say no.

I didn't watch any films. This film, The Proposal, had it all in the script. Once all the pieces, once I met Anne Fletcher and I knew what she wanted and that we wanted the same things, and once they said Ryan Reynolds was on board and once the casting came together, you saw what it wanted to be.

I am exactly where I want to be now. You can't go backward. I'm not going backward. I'm grateful that I'm here, blessed to have what I have. Nobody can be prepared for anything. If you end up in a place where you can look back and go, 'It happened, but I'm so lucky to be sitting where I am sitting...'

I was able to say to everyone, 'Would you be willing to take a role that you've cherished and worked on for a long time and change it to female?' And there was not any hesitation, which was a real win. That hopefully shows a shift in the climate for women in film, although we still have some climbing to do.

Being in front of a camera, in a nice dress, getting all dressed up is extreme. There's a lot of other extreme situations, you know, just getting out of bed sometimes is extreme - but I do it. Just got to do it, just got to get up. Put your sweatpants on, brush off the dog hair and just get out of the house!

Being in front of a camera, in a nice dress, getting all dressed up, is extreme. There's a lot of other extreme situations, you know, just getting out of bed sometimes is extreme - but I do it. Just got to do it, just got to get up. Put your sweatpants on, brush off the dog hair and just get out of the house!

When you have a full page of well-written dialogue that has a thought process to it, it is pretty easy to memorize. It's a lot easier to memorize than if you're in a scene and other people are talking, and you have maybe one word or one sentence that you have to interject at the right time and in a natural way.

There is a difference between executive producing and producing. Producing, you have no life for two years. You take everything personally, you want to kill everyone, you're depressed and angry, and then in the end you feel excited when it actually works. But executive producing, you can go home at the end of the day.

I'm always in this shape, that shape, whatever shape you like the most. I am always in various stages of shapes. If the woman needs to be more soft I'll gain weight and then I'll lose weight for another film that I did where I wanted her to be more wiry. I enjoy using my body as something that helps me get to a character.

I feel like when you have an unauthorized police badge and something that looks like it could be a concealed weapon in the small of your back that when you, someone crosses you, pisses you off, road rage, I think just the slight badge and the little moving away of the jacket and not losing eye contact does amazing things.

I think most of us are raised with preconceived notions of the choices we're supposed to make. We waste so much time making decisions based on someone else's idea of our happiness - what will make you a good citizen or a good wife or daughter or actress. Nobody says, 'Just be happy - go be a cobbler or go live with goats.'

Back when I was very small, and we had this bathroom with these sort of paneled mirrors on the side. And I would just sit there - because it was the only warm room in the house. And I would - if I was in a bad place - I would go to my imaginary place with these mirrors, and create this entire other world to sort of help level out what I was dealing with.

I never felt I was missing anything ever until one day I stopped long enough to smell the roses outside of this little treadmill I'd gotten myself onto and I realised there were other things that I like that I didn't know. I realised I didn't like certain things in my life that I then got rid of and it just opened the door to a plethora of other things that entered.

To me, the producing falls into the same as acting. It requires so much time out of your life, and I take it very personally, I realize. So if I do something, it just has to be something I love and I don't want anyone else to do. When I open projects, maybe something will appeal to me. I think I'm not opening them because I don't want anything to appeal to me right now.

If I can do anything in this time of my career, I want to make it easier for other actresses and girls who are growing up to go, 'I get to be a part of a comedy or an action film or a romantic comedy or a thriller or just a romance, without having to wind up with someone to complete us.' I complete me. I just got lucky that, after I completed myself, I met someone who could tolerate me.

I've learned that success comes in a very prickly package. Whether you choose to accept it or not is up to you. It's what you choose to do with it, the people you choose to surround yourself with. Always choose people that are better than you. Always choose people that challenge you and are smarter than you. Always be the student. Once you find yourself to be the teacher, you've lost it.

We just assume all the great actors are in New York first and then L.A. second, and it's so not true. There's such amazing talent everywhere. It's exciting that now that there are these sort of new Hollywoods or new filmmaking communities that really benefit from these great faces and character actors and leading actors that just are fresh and exciting and bring an authenticity to the piece.

I was never the kind of girl who said, "One day, I am going to be a beautiful bride, and I am going to have a family." I wanted to work and support myself and make my parents proud. All I did was work. I did three or four films a year, and felt like I was on a treadmill. Finally I said, "Nothing is exciting to me anymore." So I took six months off, which turned into a year, and said, "God, I don't miss it." That's when all kinds of interesting things crossed my path.

I now have faith in those who say they represent a faith. Whereas before I was like, 'Do not give me a lecture on how to live my life when I know I'm a pretty decent human being. I might not go to church every day, but I know I do the right thing or try to. You're going to church and you're still sleeping around on your wife and spending everyone's money. How are you better than I am?' So I've finally met people that walk the walk and it's made me happy, really happy.

If you're gonna tell a story from beginning to end, I always think you have to have a great structure in a script. If it gets you excited and it's something you've never read before that's another plus. I think also with improv and that whole world of stand-up, that's a whole other organism of comedy that still needs a story, but it's more free-form. On the set, it is the combination of both those worlds coming together: a great script and an allowance to play with it.

My life changes dramatically every time I get up out of bed. After my proposal life changed in that I wasn't asked to change. I always thought that marriage meant someone was going to ask you to stop being who you were. And I met someone who not only wants me to be who I am but likes it. So, my life changed in that my views towards marriage stopped being morbid. I found I was ready to be a good partner where I don't think I was a very good partner to people before. I stepped up my game.

Picking roles, my way of choosing them is vastly different now than it was a long time ago, but I can only be that way now because of what I've learned from the past. So I'm choosing now not to choose any work, because when you've had such a nice ride, unexpected rides and fulfilling rides, you really don't want to take a step backwards. It's really made me satisfied in a way that I wasn't looking for, but I was blessed with it and now I feel really full, in a good way, where I don't need to rush out and go find something.

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