Jodie Foster

“Adolescence is a tough one to be a child actor.”

“I feel at various times in my life that I've been at a point where I had to choose between a death sentence and a life sentence. And I want to live. What do I do to live? What do I do to be vital? And the answer is always creativity. The answer is always art.”

“I'm really not a clothes person. To me, that's just work. It's the thing I hate to do the most. I don't want to be judged in that way.”

“I think Anna and the King is a look at Asia from the Asian perspective, reflecting the Asian experience, which is very rare.”

“I saw leaving college as an opportunity to do something different with my life. I always thought that becoming an academic was going to be my path.”

“With 'Taxi Driver,' I had this eureka moment. I realized that acting could be much more than what I had been doing. I had to build a character that wasn't me.”

“My definition of a friend is somebody who adores you even though they know the things you're most ashamed of.”

“I spent a lot of time not in school, so I didn't have deep relationships with kids my own age.”

“I fantasize about having a manual job where I can come home at night, read a book and not feel responsible for what will happen the next day.”

“Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable.”

“I love more than anything looking at a movie scene by scene and seeing the intention behind it.”

“I prefer to commit 100 per cent to a movie and make fewer films, because it takes over your life.”

“Everybody reads for me. I was never weird about that. I never minded coming in and reading. They should know if I'm the right person, and I should know if I want to do a movie.”

“I was one of those avid moviegoers as a kid, and we didn't have video, so we went to see everything five times. I went to see every foreign film playing in my town. As times went on, I watched a lot less films. I have a different film school now. My film school now is my life experience.”

“I'm a technician. I don't go for the get-into-the-role stuff. I read the lines and play the scenes.”

“I don't have a burning desire to act, strangely enough. I don't know that if I hadn't been an actor as a young person, I don't know that I ever would have chosen this because it's not really my personality.”

“All the movies that I make in some ways have to be the story of my life. There are different chapters in my life.”

“I think I'm drawn to films more as a director with a directorial mind even as an actor. I make movies to make the films, not to act.”

“I have, in some ways, saved characters that have been marginalized by society by playing them - and having them still have dignity and still survive, still get through it.”

“Well, I certainly was exposed to and learned to appreciate the work of great directors early on. As a kid, my mother used to take me to see really interesting arty films in Los Angeles.”