On Her Mother

- “She made a mistake … I don’t think she knew any better - obviously. I’ve definitely tried. I made the efforts, and I’ve sort of started … you know, it’s that stubborn thing of, ‘Well, I tried… I tried enough. Now it’s your turn.’”

- “At some point in my life, I hope my mother and I will get together…unfortunately that got dragged out into the public eye. This is a wound that needs to heal slowly and times does that. And we love each other.”

- “I never thought my mom would not know my husband.”

- “There are times I feel I gave my mom unnecessary stress.”

On Her Girlfriends

- “I have so much love. I have love. My women friends - they’re all my mothers, they’re all my sisters, they’re all my partners, they’re all my wives, my everything. It’s hard to find a man who can live up to any of them.”

On Image

- “You’re damned if you’re too thin and you’re damned if you’re too heavy. According to the press I’ve been both.”

- “Its impossible to satisfy everyone and I suggest we all stop trying.”

- “It’s those moments when I’m being most truthful, being the highest form of myself and, you know, a nice pair of Jimmy Choo stiletto come-do-me pumps don’t hurt.”

- “I’d love for you to put on a dress and shoes and have a hundred people scream at you and then walk down a carpet. There are dresses that are exquisite, but you have to hold your breath to sit down or walk up stairs. I’m more comfortable in a simple dress I can just wear and kick off my shoes and sit cross-legged on the couch.”

- “Nobody thinks of themselves as sexy, really. Some days you go, ‘Hey, I’m not going too bad today.’ But if you try and be sexy, you’ll never be sexy.”

- “Quirky is sexy, like scars or chipped teeth. I also like tattoos - they’re rebellious.”

- “Sometimes Lisa Kudrow, Courteney Cox and myself compare the cellulite on our thighs and butt. We’re not that different from other girls. Women are obsessed about their hips; mine are really wide, as if they were made for having children. The day I become pregnant the baby will have all the room it wants inside of me.”

- “Actually, I have bit of a shoe fetish. Men don’t really notice women’s shoes, but women wear them for each other. I’m a bit of a shrimp, so anytime I can look a little taller in heels, I’m happy. I love the way the calves and legs look in heels. Even when I’m barefoot and trying on an outfit, I’m constantly standing on my toes.”

- “I still live somewhat by the Zone, it’s the only thing that works for me. Before, I had been starving myself and in a dieting vortex I couldn’t get out of. Now I pretty much eat whatever I want.”

- “I don’t like any photographs of myself. It’s not me. It’s definitely a different person. Especially that Rachel s—. And with that old hairdo. Oh, I hate looking like that.”

- “I don’t know what it means to be a sex symbol. When I see myself on a magazine cover I don’t see it as me, but as someone painted, fluffed, puffed and done-up. I don’t think about living up to it, it’s like something that just happened.”

- “Isn’t it funny? Your image of yourself is so different than other peoples’. I’m not good at hearing positive things - I can accept criticism better. I’m very critical of myself - which gives me something to work on. I want to evolve.”

On Love & Babies

- “I love that feeling of being in love, the effect of having butterflies when you wake up in the morning. That is special.”

- “It’s a wonderful thing to have somebody I love so much. Who loves me and accepts me with all my insecurities and struggles.”

- “It’s a real gift to find someone to share your life with and it turns out right.”

- “Most of our friends have kids and they seem to have a lot of fun. Of course, there is a lot of work and responsibility, too. I am under no illusion, but I still feel that babies are so magical that I want at least one of my own. Brad feels the same way. We hope it is ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ and I don’t think of just having one.”

- “True love brings up everything - you’re allowing a mirror to be held up to you, daily.”

- “The greater your capacity to love, the greater your capacity to feel the pain.”

- “Romance is more important then sex. But if out of a beautiful romance comes great sex, all the better.”

- “Maybe it’s a fairy tale, but I believe in happily ever after.”

- “The ultimate is finding a place where you have no inhibitions, nothing to hide, where you can learn with one another.”

On Life

- “Life is funny. Life isn’t categorized into comedy, drama, action, is it? So I don’t know why they try to categorize everything. It drives me crazy-why it would have to be just a romantic comedy or . . . I want to have a little integrity, a little story, you know.”

- “Once you figure out who you are and what you love about yourself, I think it all kind of falls into place.”

- “I learned a lot about human relations and emotions at a young age, dealing with adults who were all of a sudden children. It’s definitely hard. You deal with them fighting through you. That’s a drag.”

- “I would love to sit down with all the people who are doing wrong in the world and go: Hey, what’s up with you? What is your f*cked up problem? Go smell the roses for crying out loud.”

- “I think growing old should be done gracefully, though. There are some woman who shall remain nameless who have gone way too far. Some of them look like the Grinch. They look like they’re snorkeling with the snorkels still stuck in their mouths. I haven’t done the Botox thing…yet. Something frightens me about injecting botulism into my brain cavity. I love the expression showing in my face. But God knows I could use it. See, right here.”

- “I look at life like rock climbing. You get through the first tier, you rest for a minute, you look back and see how far you’ve come. Then you look up and you’ve got another tier to climb.”

- “At the end of the day when you go up to the big guy, he ain’t gonna care if you were famous loaded, any of that. So it comes down to love. Have you loved? Have you loved and received love?”

- “I always say don’t make plans, make options.”

- “The money that people have made out of these tabloid papers and TV shows is unbelievable. It’s the disgusting side of Hollywood. They’re always making up fights between the Friends co-stars. There was one in Star magazine that said I was ‘The Queen of Mean’. I was, like, ‘Whaaaat?!’”

- “If you never take a risk, you actually risk loosing out in every department of life.”

- “I think there comes a point where you have to grow up and get over yourself, lighten up… and forgive.”

- “I’m just so sad about Friends ending that I got all goosey and weepy thinking about it. It’s already been nine years, which is longer than I’ve stayed with anything. I know my bank account has changed, but otherwise I’m the same person I was when I started. There have been wake-up calls though. I started out wanting to succeed and prove that I could be an independent working woman. Now I’m seeing the bigger picture, realizing that family and enjoying your life are more important than the next role.”

- “Really try to follow what it is that you want to do and what your heart is telling you to do.”

- “I guess we’d be living in a boring, perfect world if everybody wished everybody else well.”

- “We only have one life, and we’re here for such a short period of time, you’d better have a blast with the person you’re with.”

- “I’ve learned that you can get through things that hurt. My pain was real, but nothing will kill you. Nothing. People are unbelievable. We have such resilience.”

- “If you don’t take times to recharge, you’re gonna drive yourself into the ground and then your life goes by too fast and there’s nothing. I haven’t always lived by this motto, but I really don’t want to be one of those people who live to work. I want to work to live.”

On Men

- “Just finding somebody that was your best friend, who you could be with and enjoy the passage of time — and that’s what I found.”

- “The best smell in the world is that man that you love.”

- “I’m very old fashioned when it comes to love. I like men who act like gentlemen. The first time a boyfriend brought me breakfast in bed, I nearly cried.”

- “Greek men are all about big moustaches, lots of ouzo and dancing with women who aren’t necessarily their wives. And also their moms tell them they’re perfect so they think they can do no wrong. And there’s nothing worse than a man who thinks he can do no wrong. Let’s get real.”

- “You’d have to be pretty bad for me to move out. No communication is a bad thing that guys are guilty of. I hate men who are selfish with their feelings - men who can’t talk about the way they feel. But I’m not demanding at all. Making me a cup of coffee is an awesome thing to do.”

- “I don’t think guys are doing anything wrong (during sex), but I do think you’re too conscious of yourselves. Stop being aware of what you’re doing and how it’s appearing, and just feel it. You’re always worrying ‘Is she enjoying this?’ and ‘Is my thing big enough?’ But who cares? Sex is a messy enough business at the best of times. And I think it’s important to be able to laugh when you’re having sex - when it’s appropriate. It can be very damaging when you laugh at the wrong moment.”

On Friends

- “We’re all with Friends until Friends dies. If one of us goes, we all go.
One of us wouldn’t leave. It wouldn’t be the show it is without each of us.”

- “When you watch the show in reruns… it’s so funny to be flipping channels
and see an old episode and think, ‘God we were awful. Such babies’.”

- “The boys are like our brothers. We love our boys.”

- “It happened so fast. I went in, read the script, laughed out loud, got home and an hour later had the part.”

- “[The show ending is] like a divorce nobody wants.”

- “We really care for each other, making sure that everybody’s okay.”

- “I’ll start crying [thinking about the end]. That’s a tough one. If you go back to the beginning, I think everybody has a special place for Ross and Rachel.”

- “We’ve all cried. We don’t know what it’s going to be like. Like we didn’t know what it was going to be like when we started, we have no idea [what it will be like at the end]. We’re all gonna be blithering idiots.”

- “It hits in moments and that’s when you get all teary and weepy.”

- “It’s hard. It’s just 10 years of this incredibly group of people and it’s weird that it’s ending because it doesn’t seem like it really needs to but it does.”

- “It is an absolute bonus to make friends out of colleagues, but we are genuinely friends and our relationships grow stronger every day. We rely on each other for strength because we’ve been through so much in our lives together already.”

On Business

- “I was told to avoid the business all together because of the rejection.
People would say to me, ‘Don’t you want to have a normal job and a normal
family?’ I guess that would be good advice for some people, but I wanted to
act.”

- “I remember dreaming about it, about being on TV. I remember seeing Children of a Lesser God on Broadway. I was sitting in the second or third row, and I was
just so blown away, and I walked out saying, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”

- “I’m not taking the Hollywood thing too seriously because we’ve all seen this business chew people up and spit them out. I think I’ve learned from my family and friends that this is something I want to do, and do well. There’s so much more to learn. It’s very bizarre to be in this position. You almost feel like you haven’t earned this yet. I want to wait until I get to a place where I can say, ‘Now I deserve all this’. That will happen. But you have to look at what you’ve done. It’s a hard thing to pat yourself on the back.”

- “I remember seeing ‘She’s The One’ for the first time. I was like, ‘I should not be on a screen that big. It doesn’t work.’”

- “You can’t start something privately, you can’t break up privately, you can’t lose a parent privately—those are all the little thorns that come along with this beautiful rose. You kind of get a prick now and again.”

Random Comments

- “I don’t get sent anything strange like underwear. I get sent cookies.”

- “I love the sun, I love the sand, I love the water.”

- “I’ve never been able to do that Zen kind of thing with a hundred sweaty people in the room, I’d rather meditate on my own.”

- “Mexican food is a brilliant indulgence.” [How does she wash it down?] “I love margaritas, martinis and cold, cold beer.”

- “After feeling sick and not really doing anything, going back into yoga, your muscles come back and you feel strong. Inner strength. I love it.”

- “They say there’s certain time of the night or the morning when you’re more open to receiving information - if there is information to be received - if you’re one of those New Agers who believe that stuff, which I’ve been known to do. I love that stuff.”

- “If you keep your eyes open and watch, it’s your choice whether or not to learn. You can’t help but see the process.”

Speeches

People’s Choice Award, January 9, 2007

- “Woo! Man, I tell ya, lucky thing we did wear underwear, huh? Er… wow, hi! First of all, you know, thank you for loving The Break-Up - I did. (audience laughs hard at the unintended pun and Jennifer giggles, too) No… it was… truly just a fantastic experience and an amazing cast. And dear friend and fantastic co-star Vince Vaughn who’s so funny and talented. Peyton Reed. And I just, you know… You all have supported me since the days of Friends and just through - this is heavy (referring to the award) - just, you know, through all of it - the good work, bad work and the ugly. I just thank you for continually inviting me back, so thank you and I love you, thanks.”

Emmy Award

- “Oh my God! Wow! Thank you! I… I… don’t… well… oh boy! I just have to say thank you, from the bottom of my heart. This has been the greatest nine years of my entire life. To work with this cast, who make me better everyday, who inspire me everyday. Our writers, the most brilliant writers in television, and I wouldn’t be here, any of us would not be here without you guys. Marta, David and Kevin and our crew and Inger and craft services and my family, my dear friends who I love so much and who keep me grounded, and my husband, I love you so much! Thank you! Thank you very much!”

Golden Globe Award

- “Oh my Gosh, I barely just got here. Jeez. Oh my Lord, I never expected this to happen. Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press. Thank you. Wow, this is surreal. Er, okay, I have to thank these five people: Matthew Perry, David Schwimmer, Lisa Kudrow, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc. I love you guys. You started out as my colleagues, and you’re my friends and my family. This wouldn’t even be happening if it wasn’t for what I learned from you guys every day. And, er, Warner Brothers, of course, and Martha and David and Kevin, our brilliant writers who just don’t ever stop being brilliant and I can’t believe this. That’s - I just thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I love my job and thank you. Thank you.”