In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude which our eye perceives which art reproduces and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.

It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

The forties seventies and the nineties when money was scarce were great periods when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.

I get in trouble when I say things like 'I'm attracted to violence.' I was a pretty angry kid and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from.

There are two sorts of curiosity - the momentary and the permanent. The momentary is concerned with the odd appearance on the surface of things. The permanent is attracted by the amazing and consecutive life that flows on beneath the surface of things.

For the last 20 years of my life I've had the mantra to do amazing parts with amazing people in amazing projects so I'm attracted to good story writing and character and good people. That's what I'm always searching for and I don't think that's ever going to change.

This is what I asked for and in this day and age that's what actually goes on. But what hurts me the most is that I work just as hard as any other actress around my age like Scarlett Johansson but I just don't get the opportunities that they get because people are so distracted by the mess that I created in my life.