“The people on my mum's side of the family are atheist intellectuals who are ueber-proper. My dad's side of the family are missionaries who are more comfortable sitting around in sweatpants than they are in a five-star restaurant. But those two influences converged in my life.”

“When I got old enough to date, I realized that Valentine's Day is just a commercial marketing scam to make men feel bad. So I let my boyfriends off the hook.”

“Even if you're unhappy, just pretend that you're happy. Eventually, your smile will be contagious to yourself. I had to learn that. I used to think, 'I'm being fake,' but you know what? Better to be fake and happy than real and miserable.”

“When I got the job on 'Lost,' I was a broke university student living in the crappiest part of town, with a duct-taped back window on a broken-down car. I existed on peanut butter and tea.”

“There's nothing more frustrating than when fans use a nickname. That's like people you don't know using names from people that you're intimate with. Like if my mom has a nickname and a fan finds it out and starts using it, that's creepy.”

“Around the time I graduated from high school, I decided better to underachieve and have friendship than to overachieve and be alone.”

“I'm from Canada, and New Zealand feels like you took all the best bits of Canada and squished them onto a tiny island like Hawaii. I was absolutely blown away by the beauty of the South Island.”

“In your 20s you can be pretty, but you don't accomplish real beauty until you find wisdom and depth.”

“I have an American son and an American partner, so marriage might logistically make sense at one point. My partner is a stay-at-home father, so if he wants to be on my health plan, or tax wise, or maybe on paper we want to have our I's dotted and our T's crossed, but emotionally, neither of us really feels the need for it.”

“I definitely come down on the spiritual side. I think very few things in life happen by chance.”

“It would be amazing to play Sylvia Plath. She was so dark, and what came out of her writing was troubled and fierce. The dimensions, levels, layers and levels would be incredible to take on.”