Reese Witherspoon

I started working on trying to sound like June from the very beginning.

Well I had my kids so young that I kind of feel that I’m a kid too and am growing up with them. The things they’re interested in tend to really influence me.

[On roles resembling the title character in ‘Penelope’] I like this girl because she is a bit of a bad-ass. I grew up watching movies with people like Barbara Stanwyck, and sometimes I get frustrated that there aren’t a lot of great female characters out there that young women can look at and go, ‘I want to be like that’. I go to movies and yell at the women on-screen, ‘Shoot him; just shoot him.’ I mean, why why does the guy always have to shoot him?

I feel there are certain people who are systematically ripping (feminism) down because of their lack of regard and their ignorance about what the women before us had to go through.

[On being criticized after admitting she and then-husband Ryan Phillippe have gone to couples therapy] Since when is self-improvement a negative? Why wouldn’t I be interested in psychology? I like to read a lot of psychology books. I’m obsessed with child behavior; I would love to be a child psychologist.

It’s fun to do a comedy and hook people in and then hoodwink them into watching a serious movie. I like to lead in with the comedy and then hit them over the head with a drama.

They put all this money into these huge movies, and then no one goes to see them… That sort of shows that they’re out of touch. Then, everyone in town passes on my little movie, and it does really well.

Trump hasn’t said one crazy thing, he’s said thousands of crazy things, each of which blunts the effect of the others.

George Clooney married Amal Alamuddin this year. Amal is a human rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, was an adviser to Kofi Annan regarding Syria, and was selected to a three-person U.N. commission investigating rules of war violations in the Gaza Strip. So tonight, her husband is getting a lifetime achievement award.

My favourite part [of Pulp Fiction] is when Sam has his gun out in the diner and he tells the guy to tell his girlfriend to shut up. ‘Tell that bitch to be cool. Say: Bitch be cool.’ I love those lines.

I think too many people look at the arts with a religious outlook. Arts, music, singing and performing, it’s all make-believe.

[on Trump] He’s like the guy drowning but waving off a lifeboat saying, ‘Get out of here, I’m very buoyant. I’m the most buoyant. Everybody talks about my buoyancy. I’m a tremendous floater.’

My vocal style I haven’t tried to copy from anyone. It just developed until it became the girlish whine it is today.

I think everyone’s intentions are to become a performer at first. But by the time I was in high school and college, I discovered that I liked writing and that I was probably a little better at it.

The idea of being in control for the sake of control is not really important to me. If everyone is sharp and doing what they’re doing well, you don’t really need to be in control all the time.

There are so few great talents, it’s always a discovery when you find the one.

I was labeled a ‘theatre type’ in high school, which made it hard to fit in and feel part of things.

It’s my nature to downplay.

There’s so much of this beautiful planet that is still actually spectacular and stimulating. There are so many amazing people that you meet along the way. By using my career as the wind in the sails of my adventures, I could see so many things and so many people that I might have missed had my career gone a different direction.

This Velvet Mafia thing is just another homophobic, nasty kind of thing that jealous queens make up.

Most of the time you’re too busy to think about it. But every now and then you say, ‘I work at ‘Saturday Night Live ‘ and that is so cool.