Jolie's exotic mixture of brains and glamour makes her the one reliable international star, and one of the few of either gender to make people in every country pay to see her.

The Disney animators' rules on adult females: mothers are perfect but imperiled; stepmothers are wicked and occasionally homicidal; godmothers are sweet things with magical powers.

We lived a lovely, middle-class, suburban life in Philadelphia. And I really thought that the TV programs of the '50s, like 'Father Knows Best' and 'The Adventures Of Ozzie And Harriet' Nelson were documentaries filmed with hidden cameras in our neighborhood.

Although the Academy prefers their Best Pictures grounded in realism, not fantasy, Lee's 'Life of Pi' win proved that the voters understand and appreciate the qualities a visionary director needs to create an otherworldly adventure.

By the way, I'm funniest when I'm not being funny. I'm better to laugh at than with, pretty much.

Sometimes it takes ten seconds to see some humor in your dilemmas, sometimes ten years.

I was in something called 'Garth Marenghi's Darkplace' which was a real cult comedy; it's sort of a spoof horror sort of thing, and it only ever had one series, but I liked the fact that it only had one series because it's kind of got this little gemlike quality to it that there were only ever six episodes.

I realized that comedians of the day were operating on jokes and punch lines. The moment you say the punch line, the audience either laughs sincerely or they laugh automatically or they don't laugh. The thing that bothered me was that automatic laugh. I said, that's not real laughter.