I refuse to step inside the ring and fight like a gladiator against my own. I'm not playing that game. Any woman who has survived a year or more of making music has my undying respect.

Actually I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes.

If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children things that touch your soul.

When I finally got up to Industrial Light And Magic to work on the 'Star Wars' movies as a model-maker it felt like dying and going to heaven.

I never stopped studying Buddhism. In the past few years in between movies I do a retreat.

I always always meant to be on stage. I only ended up even auditioning for television and movies because I was understudying a Turgenev play on Broadway and was so broke that when I got a mini-series I had to take it and was so ashamed because I was such a snob.

Even if we die at 100 we're still dying young. I want at least 700 years. There's a lot of travelling and books to read and movies to see. I'm not going to squeeze it all in in 85 years.

That was my childhood. I grew up with the monks studying Sanskrit and meditating for hours in the morning and hours in the evening and going once a day to beg for food.

It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.

My mom was dying for me to write a book she was my biggest advocate.