Krysten Ritter

I've never been a fearful person. When I was growing up, I wanted to be an actress, a writer, and a musician and I never really processed that those are the three hardest jobs - I just never even processed it.

I don't normally do shoots in bikinis - I'm just not that kind of girl. But for 'Maxim' I was like, 'Bring it on!' I wanted to wear the higher heels and the skimpier bathing suit. I figured I'd go for it!

Magazines and opinions of you and stuff like that, those will change, but your opinion of yourself does not have to based on what other people say. So I just learned that my inner voice has to be louder than their outside voice.

I lived through the Fifties in the Midwest when everything that was happening - the repression of homosexuality, for instance, the demonization of the Left, the giggly, soporific ordinariness of adolescence, the stone-deafness to the social injustice all around us - seemed not only unobjectionable but also nonexistent.