Reese Witherspoon

I think women are natural caretakers. They take care of everybody. They take care of their husbands and their kids and their dogs, and don’t spend a lot of time just getting back and taking time out.

I get crazy in a bookstore. It makes my heart beat hard because I want to buy everything.

I feel like there’s a race being run in Los Angeles for some unattainable goal – to be the best, the skinniest, the most beautiful. I just admit that that’s what I’ll never be.

Well I always wanted to be Dolly Parton when I was a little girl. I was obsessed with her.

While making Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde, I had like 50 outfit changes. It was great! I’m real into the whole “girlie” thing, it was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it.

I love books.

Growing up is not being so dead-set on making everybody happy.

The suit-and-tie job is very nice, but it’s not really who I am in my heart.

I picked up a guitar and found it very difficult and I sort of graduated to drums because I found them very easy – I suppose it was a case of natural aptitude. Mitch Mitchell was my role model at the time, and I still think listening to Mitch Mitchell, especially the early stuff with Hendrix (Jimi Hendrix), is just fantastic.

[on Mae West] I do think she was a spectacular talent. There’s no question she was a comedic genius, but I did, in person, actually feel like she was some kind of a dockworker in drag.

I feel like dress socks differentiate you in a different way – especially men in suits who just have the traditional business suit. The dress sock is the way to change it up in your mind and I like wearing my pants up higher so you see them.

There’s not a lot of towns that I can go to and take family – too many incongruous knocks on doors – “Hello, honey. Have you missed me?”

One failed attempt at a shoe bomb and we all take off our shoes at the airport. Thirty-one school shootings since Columbine and no change in our regulation of guns.

[on the NSA spying scandal] Mr. President, no one is saying you broke any laws, we’re just saying it’s a little bit weird you didn’t have to.

To be honest, I don’t want No. 1’s anymore. Now, don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t mind the odd few, but I’d also like a record going in at eight and staying around.

Music is all I know.

News is not a game show. You don’t win a car if you happen to be right.

I am a big Jeff Richmond fan.

[on accepting his CBE] I owe everything to the musicians I work with. From the UK to Africa to Tennessee, it is their brilliance that I bounce off. Alone I’m nothing.

When I was a kid I used to hide behind the curtains at home at Christmas and I used to try and be Elvis. There was a certain ambience between the curtains and the French windows, there was a certain sound there for a ten-year-old. That was all the ambience I got at ten years old…I think!

After college, I knew I wanted to work in comedy, so the first thing I did was go to where the comedy was. I moved from Charlottesville to Chicago, because that’s where The Second City and Improv Olympics are. You have to go wherever you need to go to study what interests you.