Sookie is about as radically different from me and a lot of the work I've previously done as you could possibly come up with.

Sookie is always in distress, it wouldn't be 'True Blood' if someone wasn't trying to kill her.

There are very few films or plays or anything about really happy people with perfect lives.

You find happiness where you find it.

I just do what feels right. I think the great thing about getting to do what I do is that you can try out being a different person without having to screw up your life to do it.

I really liked the idea of focusing on one thing for, hopefully, a long time to come. I also like the idea of a consistent lifestyle, as opposed to not really knowing where on the planet you're going to be at any given moment.

I think it's an amazing quality to be able to roll with the punches and not be totally ruined as a person because life's been rough for you. That's a really admirable way to go through your life.

I think that in itself is kind of an amazing achievement to be able to say that your full-time career is in any creative arts, let alone a show that has kept people interested for coming on four seasons and hopefully more.

I'm drawn to doing interesting stuff at work. And some of the time with the supernatural, you get to do really crazy, fun things. But I'm not a big genre-fantasy gal, particularly.

Like most people my age, my job is the main focus of my life. I don't have some kind of jet-setting fabulous lifestyle where I'm constantly in situations to acquire amazing anecdotes, that's it.

There's nothing more exciting as an actor than getting to do something that you're not entirely sure that anyone would let you do, and getting to take a big jump in a completely different direction.

We all had to learn Southern accents. It wasn't a big research show. With the 'Wounded Knee' project, I locked myself in my apartment with history books so I would know what we're talking about.

Well, the years from 10 to 20, when your body, mind and everything is like changing every five minutes, can be pretty torturing. And most of the interesting characters, I think, are somewhat tortured or torturous. I'm 20 now, so I'm only just an adult.

When it's a love scene with someone you actually love, there's no feeling like, 'Can I touch him here? Can I touch him there?' You know what your boundaries are - or what they aren't, I suppose.

While I have always, felt like an outsider, it's because of the professional choices I have made, so it's not like I am planning to throw myself a giant pity party.

You gain and lose different things in different mediums or different sectors of different mediums. There are liberties you get on tiny indie films in terms of not having to be designed toward a marketing demographic.

If I don't do laundry today, I'm gonna have to buy new clothes tomorrow.

Stubborn people get themselves in a lot of trouble, but they also get things done.

Maybe I'm misjudging people, but I feel like a lot of people still have an image of me in a bonnet at nine years old.

I don't know when acting came to be more about awards than about the work. Judging who's better than the other person shouldn't be part of why we're doing this job. It should be about entertaining people.