On herself:
• "I'm a bit superstitious about certain things, like what shoes to wear. If I wear the wrong shoes, the whole day may go wrong. Or if I don't get to the bottom of the stairs before the door closes - stupid little things like that. Then I also have all the normal ones, like don't walking under ladders and so on."
• "I sometimes do worry that actors are people's role models, you know. And doctors and teachers and people doing really important things just get paid nothing. And they put us on the cover of magazines. They should be our heroes. I find it all a bit dubious."
• "I'm not one for parties and stuff like that. I get a bit nervous around lots of people. Being invisible is what I really enjoy. That I find quite entertaining."
• "I kind of think of myself as an actress. Maybe I'm misguided, but I don't feel involved."
• "I can't even remember my teenage years. Normal healthy rebelious authority-questioning adolescent. I guess. It's a pretty normal story."
• "At Cambridge I got into studying. I became, I suppose, a good girl. I really did have three of the best years of my life."
• "I go along, do my best, and realize that I can't do anything about what people think."
• "I'm a very unrealistic person. That's why I'm an actor. I'm involved in make-believe all the time."
• "I wish I had some exotic hobby like doing yoga upside down on a tightrope, but I don't. I just like good conversation, and I love seeing my friends and going out for a great meal."
• "You either are [an activist] or you are not and I’m not. There are people like Tessa, my character. She would wake up in the morning and be absolutely driven to help people. I’m just a storyteller, I tell stories. Stories help a little bit, but there are people who are driven to do that and what a tremendous thing. You can’t fake it, you can’t say, ‘Well, I think I’d like to become an activist.’ You completely just are. These people are driven and incredible people."
• "I was inspired by her [her character Tessa], but I didn’t like have a total personality change forever. I would be a lunatic if that happened every time I played a part. You know, you get back to your self."

On people:
• "People find out I'm an actress and I see that 'whore' look flicker across their eyes."
• "You know what, I have faith in people. I think people want to see something new and different. They don't want to see anything that they've seen before. They don't want to have it worked out in the first 10 minutes how it will end. I think people are really smart and sophisticated."

On movie stars:
• "I think mystery is kind of great. I don't know anything about Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn or Ava Gardner - not really - and I like that. I love watching their movies because they're my personal movie stars. I don't know what they eat and who their trainer is."

On fame:
• "I've never felt uncomfortable with my level of fame. I don't get hassled. Maybe sometimes in a minor way, but New Yorkers are much too cool for that. The thing is, you choose to be an actress, but not to be a celebrity."

On Hollywood:
• "I find Hollywood really toxic."
• "It's hard to stay grounded. It's so fucked up with all these stick thin people!"
• "Hollywood's about dressing up and that's fun."

About Darren (Aronofsky, her husband):
• "I found myself a sophisticated, educated American. He's not an actor. He's traveled the world. He knows where Europe is, unlike a lot of Americans. He's very cultured, but he's all man."

On acting:
• "You just have to play every scene honestly and forget about a reaction and what the audience is going to think. I think the more seriously you take something, the more funny it might be."
• "When I'm playing a character, I use the American accent. But when I go back to England, I just glide right back into Englishness immediately. Every actor uses a dialect coach. Every actor, and if they say they don't, they're lying. Everybody does, yeah. You don't want to worry about it. You have someone listening out to check that you're not straying."
• "I think it's true in that you have to stop thinking too much and just use your heart and your gut and your instincts. Any intellect just gets in the way. You just have to go with the feeling and not over-analyze."
• "I'm not at all like the tough, sexy femme fatale in Confidence but it's fun to play people who're really different from you, from different cultures and places. I suppose I'm a bit quieter than most of the people I play."
• "I actually think if you are an actor and you're working and you're doing pretty well like I am, I feel you really have no right to grumble. I don't think you do. Obviously I could think of things that piss me off sometimes, but it's such an amazing job. You get to travel, you get to stay in beautiful places, meet incredible people. And every time you do a different role you learn something new. Frankly, if you don't like it, you should stop and do something else."
• "I feel like I just started and hopefully I'm going to be acting when I'm an old lady."
• "I was burning to pursue this profession."

On camels:
• "I have absolutely no empathy for camels. I didn't care for being abused in the Middle East by those horrible, horrible, horrible creatures. They don't like people. It's not at all like the relationship between horses and humans."
• "Camels - ugh, they're horrible, really horrible. They smell, they really hate people, they're foul, they have terrible breath and they scream really loudly when you make them go."

On shopping:
• "God no! I hate it, absolutely hate it. I can't stand it, it's such a drag. So I just tend to wear the same things all the time. I don't like change anyway."

On Los Angeles:
• "I don't do too well there. If you were brought up in London, where you can walk around everywhere and there are theaters, you can't really do LA. I couldn't make a life there. You're in a car all the time, and there are no seasons."

On her parents:
• "They're very harsh critics and they've often said to me: 'That was shit, you were crap,' but this is the first time [after he saw 'Amy Foster'] my father said to me: 'I think one day you'll be a good actress.' "

On Elvis Presley:
• "I live him just as much when he's fat and drug-added and being wheeled and forgetting his lines and laughing. He's the ultimate performer, in that nothing could get between him and his gift."

On Dolly Parton:
• "She's a great example of a brilliantly-penned self. You know, a created self. Is she even heterosexual? We don't know. She's a great creation, this blonde, happy lady."

On motherhood:
• "I'm not quite ready yet. But yeah, ideally. I guess thats what happens if you're straight and a woman. Oh, even if you're not straight. I can't think of some exotic alternative, like growing martians in my left shoe. "
• "Being a mother has been incredible. But it can also be brutal. People think that you're totally in bliss and that babies are always angelic creatures, but it's not like that all the time."
• "I was seven months pregnant when I won the Academy Award! Really, since then, I've just been a mom, mainly. It's the most ultimate honor you can get. But I had to duck out of the rat race for a bit and be Mom."
• "I have respect for all working moms out there, because it's definitely a complicated balancing act, which millions of women are doing all the time, but I'm part of that club now."
• "It made me just want to do comedies. I was being offered all of these dramas, and I was like, ‘No, no, no. I want to do comedy. I wanted to ease back into work. I wanted to try something different than I’d ever done before."

On September 11:
• "I was staying in SoHo and saw it all happen. It was so tragic, but New Yorkers behaved so beautifully, it didn't occur to me to leave."

On theatre:
• "Theatre is going back to basics, going back to the core of your heart and technique. There's a lot to be precious about the theatre because it is a very magical feeling to be on the stage."

On fashion and her look:
• "Everyone gets weird about their looks. My nose is the most trouble, but I live with it."
• "I have to pluck my eyebrows—otherwise they're really, really Planet of the Apes. I do it myself in my bathroom with a big mirror."
• "I'm into makeup that looks like you aren't wearing it. In the daytime, I don't really wear any."
• "Dressing for the red carpet is fantasy time, but in my day-to-day life, I'm very grungy."

On her childhood:
• "I loved climbing trees. We had a great tree in the garden and I used to climb it."

On her Hungarian grandmother, Kato:
• "[She was] very, very petite, very elegant, very chic, on a small budget. She always had a manicure and heels. I’m not nearly as groomed as she was. She used to teach us how to eat properly. She could not stand it if we ever ate anything with our hands. We used to go to her house every Sunday. I remember it got a little out of control because we were eating olives, and she tried to make us eat olives with a knife and fork."

On Slight Possessions, one of her first theatre plays:
• "I used to throw myself off that ladder in every play. The ladder was eight or nine feet high. We proceeded to throw each other around. If we bled, we thought that was really cool. We were really into it."

On The Constant Gardener:
• "She was a very interesting, complex character, because she isn’t what she seemed. She’s set up to be one thing. You think she’s having an affair and she’s a floozy. And actually she is pretty noble and heroic. At the same time, she’s not an angel. She’s a bit of a pain in the ass." (on her character, Tessa)
• "There’s nothing wrong with pure entertainment, but it was actually about something real that was happening in the real world. It’s an important story and a heartbreaking love story. There were so many things in one. It was a thriller, love story, politically important, great character — it just had it all for me."
• "It was one of those scripts that I read and thought, I have to do this, and I’ll do anything to do it. I flew around the world to have a meeting. I was very tenacious about it."
• "When we were filming in the shanty town, rather than give money as a location fee, we actually built things in the slum. We built a bridge, fresh water tanks, and restroom facilities, because there was no running water there and there was a badly needed bridge to access one side to the other. So it was kind of about giving back to the community in a really helpful way."
• "The shanty town wasn’t a set. It was a place where we went with a tiny crew, like a documentary. We didn’t dress people in the background in costumes. We interacted with reality."
• "In Loiyangalani in the north, an area where there are no high schools. When they hit 11, that was it, their education is over. So we committed to it; Ralph Fiennes, myself, the producer, the director, John le Carré (who wrote the novel), and John Lyons (from Focus, the production company). We are all part of a trust and we raise money, being able to build a new classroom each year so that class can move up. So I come up with these fundraisers in New York. For instance, Cartier just recently did a big fundraiser and they gave me a huge amount of money."

On winning Oscar:
• "I was just so pregnant!” she says, recalling standing up in her long, black Narciso Rodriguez dress and walking toward the stage, “the baby kicking away. I’d never even been to the Oscars. Then, to have it when you are so pregnant and having to run to the restroom every few minutes. It was just very surreal."
• "[It was] pretty cool, because I can say to Henry that he went [to the Oscars] and that he won an Oscar."

On The Fountain:
• "Everyone warns you against it, but I loved it. I like to collaborate with him on making a life, and it was great to collaborate with him on his movie."

On The Lovely Bones:
• "No, there’s no comedy in that. I did comedy in the spring and summer and I got it out of my system a little bit. I’m ready for drama again."