I really struggled, growing up, with reading and writing. I had a hard time to do that, but I was really passionate about storytelling and about books.

When you're growing up with a learning disability, it shoots your confidence and belief in what you can accomplish academically; it really damages it.

It can't be articulated enough, that feminism means the desire to have equality between men and women. I believe that, and I act on those beliefs by going to marches and making a difference where I can.

Men should be able to see themselves in female characters and female strength, just as much as women are able to see themselves in male characters.

I started to respect older actors when I was young and then contemporary actors later on. Then I learned respect for comedy. When I was first doing theatre, I thought of it as just a means to become Sarah Bernhardt or someone like that. But acting with young people has been a great learning experience.

Joan Crawford and Bette Davis are larger than life. They just are. They sucked all the oxygen out of a room: they're icons; they loom large in our imaginations. But the truth of the matter is both women were diminutive.

In every new generation, the impulses supposed to have been rooted out by discipline in the child break forth again when the struggle for existence - of the individual in society, of the society in the life of the state - begins. These passions are not transformed by the prevalent education of the day, but only repressed.

I began my career as an economics professor but became frustrated because the economic theories I taught in the classroom didn't have any meaning in the lives of poor people I saw all around me. I decided to turn away from the textbooks and discover the real-life economics of a poor person's existence.