Elizabeth Banks

I've learned all my hair and makeup tricks on the set, and I incorporate all kinds of things when I'm getting ready, and I'm big on blotting papers. I get a very shiny forehead, which I like to call my inner glow coming out.

I suppose the best advice I ever got, frankly the advice that changed my life, came from my uncle who told me to go to drama school and study acting instead of taking a job, because he said the job would always be there.

For a time, I believed not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids. They seemed as logical and possible to me as the brittle twig of a seahorse in the zoo aquarium or the skates lugged up on the lines of cursing Sunday fishermen - skates the shape of old pillowslips with the full, coy lips of women.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.