Quotes

My life is very much in the present today. And that's what theater is all about.

[re New York] I have a real love affair with the city. I just feel like when you're up or when you're down, the city really cushions you. I feel like I just have such the blood and bones of a New Yorker that I can almost imagine better, like, giving up the fight and not being able to afford the city and going out West, keeping a small place here, and then when I'm like 80, coming back here, living on the park and going to the theater. For the matinee.

I would have done well as a gypsy child, I think. A circus baby. I coulda played a great street urchin or ragamuffin. Or just been one. I certainly liked entertaining people and making jokes, but I don't know necessarily if that's what your child is prone to that you should necessarily put them in a real working industry at six years old. By the time I was 16, I was already an exhausted cynic.

I mean, I didn't have a 28-day drug problem. I had a take-five-years-off drug problem. [Because of] "my well-publicized drug problem, there was many years I couldn't get work...I mean, life is very short but life is also very long. I don't know that there's such a rush. I think I also needed a break just in terms of the child actor in me was tired. I mean, I'd been working from, like, 6 to 24, pretty much nonstop.

[on performing her role as a cat-loving school teacher in G.B.F. (2013)'] If you're at all a reasonable human being when you're 34 years old, you don't read scripts looking at the children's parts. I don't really feel like I need to be a teenager ever again. It's really a miracle that I made it out alive. I'm doing all right being in my 30s - I think I'm hitting my sweet spot. I'm glad to have already come of age.

[on Marlon Brando's unreleased scene in 'Scary Movie 2']: I have a VHS copy of the dailies that I got because Marlon Brando's final role - sadly for him, but luckily for me - is doing this Exorcist opening teaser. I don't know what he was thinking, really. I mean, why would he do that?

[on the passing of her 'Pee Wee's Playhouse' co-star, Paul Reubens]: Love you so much, Paul. One in all time. Thank you for my career & your forever friendship all these years & for teaching us what a true original is.

[on her involvement with the film But I'm a Cheerleader] I love that film so much, and I'm so happy that it means something to people. But I'm a Cheerleader sort of had this ability to tell young kids that it was OK to be themselves, and there's nothing I believe in more than equality and human rights.