Quotes

I know certain actors are totally screwed up on drugs, yet it gets covered up. Why wasn't I excused for 'exhaustion' or 'the flu'?

There's something liberating about not pretending. Dare to embarrass yourself. Risk.

If I ever start talking to you about my 'craft', my 'instrument', you have permission to shoot me.

I believe in fate. I believe that everything happens for a reason, but I think it's important to seek out that reason - that's how you learn.

I believe you can be the person that you dream of being.

[on her favorite movies to make] I try to make movies that I would want to go see rather than ones I would just want to do as an actor. I want people to have movies full of romance and hope and empowerment, something they can escape into and feel good about. I love happy endings.

[on her morning routine] Every morning I stay in bed for ten minutes to ponder my place in the universe. Then I wash my face and check my karma.

Life is very interesting. In the end, some of your greatest pains become your greatest strengths.

I love levity. As crazy as I am, I just love to laugh!

I'm getting older so those dark circles are really starting to show. Now, I'm starting to look like Night of the Living Dead.

When I lay my head on the pillow at night, I can say "I was a decent person today." That's when I feel beautiful.

There's nothing like the power of a smile.

I'd rather be a few pounds heavier and enjoy life than be worried all the time.

I don't want to sit around and hope good things happen. I want to make them happen.

My whole life, I've wanted to feel comfortable in my skin. It's the most liberating thing in the world.

My parents are not bad people. It was just a case of them not wanting a child.

You have to fight unhappiness like a dragon with fire and breathe.

As much light as I have inside me, there's just as much darkness, I'm afraid. There's a polarity, and I still have demons to work out.

I love women who have fought to the change the world and made a difference. I want to be one of them myself.

I did karaoke once - a Pat Benatar song - and my friends looked at me with disgust (In Style magazine, September 2006).

I just think happiness is what makes you pretty. Period. Happy people are beautiful. They become like a mirror and they reflect that happiness. If somebody walks in the room and they're drop-dead gorgeous and sexy, it's really fun to look at. But if someone is giving of their spirit and they make you laugh and feel good, that's a whole other level of beauty.

[on her attraction to Christian Bale] He's so cute! And I knew him when he was a kid. He was in Empire of the Sun (1987). If he walked into the room now, I would totally clam up. Or I might go overboard and embarrass myself.

[on California's Proposition 8 (the ballot banning same-sex marriage)] We can't take a step backwards when we've already made so many strides forward. I was raised by gay men and women...it's who I am, you cannot define a family. There are children out there who need these loving homes. These are rights that are fundamental and must be had. And I will fight for however long it takes; I don't want to live in a world where prop 8 exists!

[on gay marriage] You can't define love and you can't define a family. It comes in so many radical colors. And children need loving homes and people want to adopt who are gay! Why would we ever try to stand in their way? It's unfathomable.

[When asked about gay rights] A lot of the people that I grew up around had a freedom of their sexual orientation and I just think that civil liberties are the key to life, so obviously I'm a huge supporter of that.

[on kissing Elliot Page] We do that all the time, we're friends. People can take from it what they want. We're just girls being silly and having fun, girls are affectionate with each other. We don't have that hang up of what it's gonna look like or what people are gonna think. I think it's hysterical.

[on her divorce from Tom Green] Yes, it's true we have decided to part. I love Tom very much. He has always been a great friend and that won't change.

California has, like, half the swimming pools in the whole United States. After you're successful you can't not have a pool. Here, a house without a pool is like a neck with no diamond necklace.

I love hugging. I wish I was an octopus so I could hug ten people at a time.

Happiness is the best makeup in the world. There's nothing you can put on your face that comes from a tube that's going to be as amazing as a smile.

I wish I were that all-home-grown-food perfect woman, but I'm not. I'm the mom with the kitchen on fire and food on our faces.

Be the best version of yourself, and smile and laugh while you're doing it.

[on the best advice Steven Spielberg ever gave her, and how she doesn't feel she is a good actor] Steven told me, "Don't act your characters. Be your characters." I feel like it's fake and yucky and it just doesn't ring true. But like Robert said, if you research and you study and make it personal, you just become that person, and it's your truth and everything else around you falls away. Then you're telling the truth, it's not lying, it's not fake. So he gave me that wisdom because at 6, I guess I was comfortable and more humorous than I would have remembered now. But once I got older and kept continuing acting, I don't know if I would have succeeded without that advice, because it's the thing that saved me. I'm not an actor, I'm a pretender.

[on what movie blew her mind] I think it changes every day. But today, it's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). My jaw was on the floor when I was watching it because it was the definition of visceral. I thought it was the most compelling, upsetting, beautiful-to-look-at, in-your-face film, with no tricks whatsoever, except for beautiful camera work.

[on what films shaped her the most] Pollyanna (1960), Captains Courageous (1937), The Black Stallion (1979), Foxes (1980), um, Excalibur (1981)? I was, like, obsessed with Camelot (1967) and Excalibur (1981) and Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) - any double-VHS-giant double-Beta set of those films. I just loved the swashbuckling nature of them, I was obsessed. I loved watching men in cinema, and I liked watching young girls, whether it was a Jodie Foster in Foxes (1980) or a Hayley Mills in Pollyanna (1960). It could be squeaky clean and it could be super like L.A. streets-gritty, but there was no barrier between. I liked older men and younger girls. That was what I responded to in film.

Do I like women sexually? Yeah, I do. Totally. I have always considered myself bisexual. I love a woman's body. I think a woman and a woman together are beautiful, just as a man and a woman together are beautiful. Being with a woman is like exploring your own body, but through someone else.

I don't know anybody whose road has been paved perfectly for them. There are no manuals. You don't know what life has in store for you.

Making bad decisions doesn't make you a bad person. It's how you learn to make better choices.

[on her father John Drew Barrymore] Great dad. Yeah, he would ask me for money on birthdays and, you know, inappropriate times. And I just wrote him off like, "You're not a father." I just learned you cannot emotionally invest in people who are not attainable.

When I was about seven, I discovered the Go-Go's. I went out and bought their album Beauty and the Beat and, as the vinyl twirled, my whole world changed. I stared at the girls on the cover like they were a gateway to cool. The fact that they were girls made me feel not only invited but more important - like I could be a badass too. I looked over to my Pippi Longstocking poster on the wall and thought, Yes! I like girls who rock!

[posing for Playboy at 19] When I was doing Playboy and loving it and having so much fun and don't regret a thing and love it, I didn't know I'd have kids later, thinking this is going to humiliate or embarrass my kids when I have them, if I have them.