“Yeah, there was the Flora Plum thing, where I trained for about a mont...” — Claire Danes Quote

Yeah, there was the Flora Plum thing, where I trained for about a month and I had taken a semester off for that, and two weeks prior to filming, the financing collapsed.

When I was 18 I went to college for two years and didn't work for a year which was essential for me, because my identity had been so influenced by my being an actor and I think I just needed to discover what it was to be myself, divorced from all that responsibility.

When I was a kid, I was one of those really obnoxious 'oooh oooh' girls, with my hand up in the air constantly. I've learned over the years that that's not so attractive, so I've censored that.

I actually think in some ways that it might be more challenging to be bipolar because it's so mercurial - it's so ever-changing. You can't get any traction. You can't build on a system. Whereas, somebody who has Asperger's, which is certainly a much more forgiving expression of autism, can create models for coping and build on them over time.

When the USSR collapsed, I was 11, and unlike many people, I don't miss it.

The United States is a proud, determined, hard-working, talented, patriotic nation and people, and it is not over-extended in the manner of empires of the past that took over the lands of others and eventually collapsed under the weight of the over-ambitious hegemon.

I could never gamble on stocks and shares because I saw my father get hurt that way - he lost quite a lot of money when the stock market collapsed in 2001.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, people thought the last Soviet generation was going to be the great hope for democracy. When that failed, their hopes shifted to the first post-Soviet generation, and then the second one.