Diane Lane

“The largest room in the world is room for improvement. You know, some mornings my thighs are fat. Some days my hair looks great. That's the human condition.”

“You are the age of your spine. You are as flexible as your spine. That transfers to other areas of your life.”

“Some people fascinate me. They really worship at the altar of their careers, you know? And it's terrifying. It's sort of like setting a table and waiting for someone to come along and whoosh - push all the plates onto the floor.”

“I want to sit down, and I want to laugh. Nothing works better for me than watching somebody slip on a banana peel.”

“I don't want to live in a bubble, in my craft or in the world... I can't, I would be cheating myself out of my generation and the world we live in.”

“Americans are like Pac Man. We just eat our way through the day. There's always something going into the mouth.”

“You can't get work without working.”

“All the lessons are in nature. You look at the way rocks are formed - the wind and the water hitting them, shaping them, making them what they are. Things take time, you know?”

“I have just enough attention to feel glamorous and important.”

“When you're a young child, you pick a totem animal, and you just identify with it to the point of wishing you were that animal.”

“Self-respect is a commodity worth cleaving to.”

“Secretariat was just ridiculously endowed with every positive quality that a person would seek out in a non-human. He was very aware of his environment; he surveyed the terrain before he ran and would look people in the eye.”

“It's always refreshing to step into another time.”

“I've found there to be a tremendous amount of East Coast snobbery in the journalism world.”

“Essentially, my hero-role model is Muhammad Ali, because when I watched this one fight of his with my dad when I was a kid, and I watched him not go down... I think him just taking a lot of blows and not going down, it was so moving.”

“When I was 12, all I wanted was to be good at school, and to do something admirable, something you can't take away from me because I'm not popular or beautiful enough.”

“Anyone who's had a finger pointed at them and been told they're pretty or attractive, there's a power that comes with that. But beauty for a woman becomes cumbersome because it's always being equated with youth.”

“I loved acting, I started as a child and it is interesting because I didn't compare myself to others that were doing the same thing. I just felt that I needed to stay focused and stay out of trouble.”

“What women represent to the male is, historically, a big burden. It's a lovely dream, but it's the stuff of literature, art, and everything. Living up to what the male psyche projects onto the female is the stuff of books. You'd need a lot more than an interview to go into it!”

“It's so great to watch sports live. I think everyone should watch it up close once, if possible. I would like to see every sport live at least once to fully appreciate what's happening on the court or on the field or on the ice or whatever the playing surface may be.”