"I couldn't hold it together today. George Clooney asked me if I was OK, and I practically collapsed. I couldn't stop crying, I had to go off sobbing like an idiot."

"Beauty set up distance between other people and me. It warped their behavior."

"People see you as an object, not as a person, and they project a set of expectations onto you. People who don't have it think beauty is a blessing, but actually it sets you apart."

"Not that we didn't have close relationships with our parents - I'm very close to my mom - but parents didn't think anything of going off for a few weeks and leaving their kids."

"I didn't have a financial need, and I wasn't very gifted at relationships. I probably was more like what we think of boys as being: hard to pin down and wary of commitment."

"Dreams are, by definition, cursed with short life spans."

"I admit that Post-it note sheets that adhere to virtually any surface are now my substitute of choice for retention."

"Though beauty gives you a weird sense of entitlement, it's rather frightening and threatening to have others ascribe such importance to something you know you're just renting for a while."

"Self-acceptance has been a blessed by-product of middle age."

"I never have really said much about the whole episode, which was endless. But his speech was a perfectly intelligent speech about fathers not being dispensable and nobody agreed with that more than I did."

"I've never felt more comfortable in my skin, I've never enjoyed life as much and I feel so lucky."

"I have never savored life with such gusto as I do now."

"Hollywood is like Picasso's bathroom."

"Memory is the first casualty of middle age, if I remember correctly."

"I certainly love doing comedy and feel most comfortable near it."

"I have never appreciated a quiet moment with a friend as much, a quiet moment with a book and I think part of that is my obsession with being older and time going faster and it's become increasingly sweeter for me."

"Men say they love independence in a woman, but they don't waste a second demolishing it brick by brick."

"At an age when most actresses are being phased out, I am being phased in - with a vengeance."

"But when I disappeared, it sort of pissed me off, that guys get to go on being sexual until they're seventy or eighty, and we disappear at forty-five or fifty."

"I got the role I loved the most at a point in my career when most women are being phased out."

"Were women meant to do everything - work and have babies?"

"I was getting offers. I had just turned them down. Then I realized I should be grateful that at age 54, people were still offering me film roles."

"I guess I was a mom so late in life, my daughter was the greatest thing since sliced bread."

"I remember being in tears at the hospital after Chloe was born, at the thought that someday she would have to leave home."

"It's not just in Hollywood that women run the risk of being passed by once they reach 50. It happens in real life, too."