I admire woman like Marissa Mayer, the first female engineer and then CEO of Yahoo. Women who don't only strive to be the equals of men, but who strive to live up to their full potential.

I came out of a building and this woman stopped me, like, 'You're Miss Universe!' And she was a New Yorker! I'm not used to New Yorkers being fans, because they're so blase about it, you know.

I was always interested in politics and I had great leadership skills from a young age.

In some places, women get paid 75 percent of what men earn for doing the same job, working the same hours, and I do not believe that is right.

Iraq's Sunnis need to be brought back into the fold. They need to feel as though they have a stake in the success of Iraq rather than a stake in its failure.

Success is not a stop sign.

A young person, or someone who's writing in a different way - in some ways you could say, eventually someone will find them. Eventually someone will hear them. But it's good a lot of young people persevere. Because sometimes you have to send something out a thousand times before anyone recognizes your value.

Most of my actor friends don't believe it's possible to let go of it and be happy, and for a while that was true for me. For the first two years I ached, every day. And I had such bad dreams. But then I made the decision to start working on my little shop and all that went away.