• "I've always attracted strange people. If there's one weirdo in the room, they'll come to me. It's on my forehead: 'Talk to Rose, crazy man!'"

• "People in New York sure drink a lot. I think in L.A you would all be committed to AA."

• "They are people I can peg a hundred yards away: 'I'm an ac-tor!' And I think, 'No. You're terrifying. You're reading Bukowski. You drive a jeep. You live in Beechwood - shut up!'"

• "I wasn't doing the 'there-are-no-great-roles-in-movies-for-women' kind of thing. I was just curious as to why women couldn't play the male roles. Like, why can't I be the guy? Why couldn't I be Scarlet O’Hara and Rhett Butler? Obviously, there are things to prevent that, being that I'm a girl. Which I hate."

• "I do like firing a gun, but I would never own one. I'm melancholy, and I'm Irish, and that doesn't work with weapons."

• "When I was 12 I thought 'Well, I'll need a lot of therapy probably around the time I'm 19. And after that, I'll be just fine.' That’s exactly what happened."

• "I always say I want to be buried on a hill facing the sun, under a tree – weeping willow, gotta have some shade – and I want nobody else around me. I want to be all alone. When I was little I used to imagine what kind of house I'd be in when I grew up. And the husband I'd have. And I'd always imagine the house would be in the South, probably Georgia or Charleston Wraparound, screened-in porch, rocking chairs. But I was always alone."

• "I would go out to the Rainbow Cattle Company, a gay and lesbian bar. It was hot. We'd be on the dance floor, and all of a sudden, it was like, a silent signal and everyone knew to get in line. It was very Brokeback."

• "I don’t know about other actors, but I like to think I have a dose of perspective. Though I do love it when I meet someone who works at a post office who's a complete diva. It's like, 'At lease I have an excuse.'"

• "I'd rather destroy my soul for something more meaningful than a mobile phone."

• "I really don't need any more crap. I'm a baker, and I have my baking stuff. And I collect furniture from the '20s and '30s.

• "I'm terrible... I can't do my hair at all. I get it blown out every three days. When I go to bed, I say, 'Dear God, please just let me make enough money so I can get my hair done.'"

• "Well, I think, like most people, I had sets of adversity and things like that but I also refuse to be jaded by kind of bad things in life, refused from a very early age."

• "In some ways I think I would have fit in with the studio system a lot better than today. I'm not saying I wouldn't have been suspended numerous times... Like Bette Davis was, for refusing to do the crappy movies she was contracted to do."

• On doing a TV series
"There are huge positives and huge negatives to doing a TV series: I don't like to think of all the movie roles I missed, but it was really interesting to follow a character over a period of time. My character [in Charmed] was the youngest sister, so I kind of played her like a baby Lucille Ball, but she's also a bit of a schmuck, who you feel sorry for but still think is kind of hot."

• On life after Charmed
"Well, getting up late is so much more my style, so that's been fantastic. But it is very strange to have to give up what was the kind of family that I never really had growing up. The people on the show know more about me than my best friends at the time did. I miss that a lot, actually. I thought about that a couple of times and definitely teared up. It taught me how to work and function in a family, and how if you have problems with somebody not to just run away. And I kind of wound up playing my off-screen character on the set as well — I filled the role of the person who makes everybody laugh, so they all think I'm this goofy person. Once I stepped into that I couldn't break out of it. I guess I am funny and goofy, but not all the time. I felt like it was my job to make everybody happy. I felt like the weird middle child."

• On life in Los Angeles
"I actually love it here. I wish the people that say they hate it would just go away, because I need their parking space. I go hiking a lot, and I'm not a beach person, but it's there if you want it. The ocean just seems stressful, like it's going to suck me out and kill me."

• On life in Los Angeles
"There's an element of being able to choose whatever life you want, because there's enough freaks here. Yes, people are self-obsessed, but there's anonymity in that. I could be standing naked on the corner, and people would be like, 'Oh my God! Anyway, back to me'. Also, I can walk two blocks and it's like I'm in Mexico and nobody gives a shit about me. Two blocks in another direction, and I'm in Koreatown - same thing. I go do karaoke there."

• "I've had the most bizarre assortment of jobs, all of which I got fired from, incidentally. I was not a good employee. If someone's dumb, I just have the face that says, 'You're fucking stupid'. And 'casual Fridays'? Oh, kill me now."

• On witchcraft
"It's like anything. If you're a Jehovah's Witness, cool. Don't knock on my door, but that's cool. If you're a Scientologist, cool. Just don't bombard me with it."

• "Listen, for my father all things still come back to Jesus. I speak to him once a week on the phone and all he speaks about it the situation in Iraq and how the kingdom of God will smite us all in the end. But personally, I've heard enough of that stuff to last a lifetime. God bless the Jesus Creepers, I just can't do it anymore."

• "My friends will call and say, 'Oh, they're airing the 50 Baddest Girls in Hollywood again. What'd you do this weekend, Rose?' and I say, 'Nothing,' and they're like, 'We know'. I'm famous among my friends for being completely different from the preconceived notions of me. So I wore a crazy dress one time-does that mean I wasn't ordering Martha Stewart online and baking that day? Because that's what I was doing."

• "I actually prefer the public singing, because I love people having to get up there and embarrass themselves terribly. I hate it when people are like, 'Oh, I don't sing well'. That's the point, douchebag, now get up and sing."

• "It's hard, because I've been in situations working with geniuses, and then I've worked with people who are complete and total morons. Lots of sexist directors. This one producer always hello to the breasts first, and I'm like, 'Dude, you've known me for so long. Aren't these breasts old by now?'. If they're stupid and they give me direction, I'll just smile and nod and go back and do exactly what I did before. And they'll go, 'Wow, what a great adjustment!' I've learned to pick the battles."

• "Unless you're Tom Cruise or something like that, you get paid so much more for TV. I want to do movies - certainly well more prestigious, but big hit in the salary. That'll be a rude shocker... oh, my."

• "Thankfully, I tend to see the funny side in the more absurd aspects of my life."

• On her dream role
"Someone who is vulnerable, fragile, funny, intelligent, tormented, charming, and with great emotional depth. Some of my favorite characters are Scarlett O'Hara, Anna Karenina, Lara (Dr. Zhivago), Jane Eyre. I can't wait to portray a three dimensional woman."

• "Put it like this; I've had to work extremely hard to prove myself in the eyes of the media, and to an extent I'm still doing that now. But then when you're in love with someone, you don't care what other people think, even if you know it's going to damage the course of your career. Yes, I've done some wild things, nut those actions don't define who a person is, and they definitely don't make someone 'weird'."

• "People will say, if I have a pimple 'Oh don't worry. It won't show on camera'. I don't care about camera. I care about real life. I hate looking bad in real life. I do work out a lot but it's not some maniacal thing. I basically had to wean myself off peanut butter. I was up to a jar every three days."

• "Charmed has probably caused more personal growth than I would have thought. I was an extremely undisciplined person. If I didn't like something, I would move. If I didn't like a city, I would leave. Having to work without those parameters... I suppose it is more adult."

• "Sometimes I feel like a gypsy, because I can't sit still for a minute. I always wanna go somewhere else that's new."

• "Each time that a Charmed season ends, I feel uncomfortable, I get like depressed. I eat peanut butter, I get all cranky about my zits and then after a week goes by I decide that its time to move on."

• "If I could do a Donnie Darko for a female character. Or anything like drama or a biopic. I really want to do a film on Clara Bow, still. Things like that. It doesn't even have to be offbeat. Pretty much the only thing I'm not interested in doing right now is black comedy. I'm a little bit worn out by that."

• On her hair
"Frankly, though, it's on my head and it grows out of my head, so I can do whatever I want."

• "I always try to do what's not expected of me."

• On working on a TV show
"My bank account likes it. I've always led a very gypsy-like existence up till now, I grew up all over the place, so it's been a very bizarre, odd experiment. But I'll go back to my normal life after it's all finished. I'm still having fun, though. I can get into anything that's kind of ridiculous."

• "I remember some press I did, the first Interview magazine cover. One of the taglines was me saying was me saying 'I'm gonna be pretty kick-ass by the time I'm 30. I can't wait!' Now I'm like 'Shut up bitch, what are you talking about?' But really, what are you gonna do? I've just been reading about this 114-year-old man in Spain and he's the oldest man in the world and obviously spent more of his life being old than young. It made me want to try and think about life as this big journey..."

• On being photographed nude for Allure magazine
"I have PMS - so it's a great time to be photographed. You wish the entire crew was gay and naked."

• "I can do comedy with my eyes crossed and my hands tied behind my back. And that's great. It's great fun, and we do a lot of it on the show. But if you meet anyone who only does comedy, they want to do some drama, and visa versa. So yes, I would like to do a lot more dramatic stuff."

• "Studio executives thought I stayed at home killing puppy dogs, when really I stay at home taking care of them. And they seem to be personally offended that I fell in love with a man who flies in the face of what is considered attractive."

• "I find myself to be a very calamitous person. I'm not a drama queen. I do experience those horrible highs and lows but I tend to find stability within the up and down. Nevertheless, I'd be a fool not to expect more rocks to roll in front of me, because so many already have."

• "I always had a great bullshit detector that made people nervous. I could see that the cult's actions were not corresponding with their ideas. I spoke my mind on that, which, coming from someone who was two feet tall, must have been kind of disturbing."

• "I was at this restaurant the other night and a guy said 'Rose, why do you always sit like that with your arms crossed in front of you? What are you being defensive about?' I just wanted to tell him, 'I'm hiding my breasts because I don't feel like honouring you with them right now.'"

• "At the end of the day, that's what anorexia is. You want to be bone. What does it mean to be bone? It means to be dead."

• "Yep, I have made some bad films. But unlike Kate Hudson or Gwyneth Paltrow I didn't grow up in Hollywood, with stability and wealth and all my needs were catered to. I came here trying to survive. I couldn't afford to make worthy, artistic movies for no money. I had to pay the rent."

• On mainstream Hollywood films
"I don't think that I would go see those movies because they are all made by 45-year-old men in Hollywood, who are all thinking, 'Oh, they'll get off on this, they'll think it's hip, slick, and cool!'"

• On her teenaged Scream character
"If you have a problem with me playing a teenager, go watch Beverly Hills 90210. They're all like 45. That's why Tori Spelling has all that plastic surgery."

• On her perfect man
"When I was fifteen I had a mad crush on Wallace Shawn. I like character and somebody who's really good in bed, 'cause I just have no patience for the opposite."

• "When guys hit on me, I start talking about the fascinating world of botany."

• "I enjoy playing strong characters that in their own odd way would inspire a girl to be kick ass and not a wuss."

• "I have a really strong dose of amorality in me. Fifty percent of me wants to be good and raise the bar on the evolutionary scale, and the other part wants to destroy everything. I'm sure if I lived back in Salem, I would have been burned at the stake."

• "I'm like a guy in the emotional sense. I don't like to talk about things. Discussing 'where the relationship is going' makes me want to stick my head in the oven. The stereotypical woman is always trying to get a guy to call her-like in those retarded magazines: 100 WAYS TO MAKE HIM LOVE YOU NOW. Fuck that. When I'm done with someone, I'm done."

• "This last year and a half has probably been the happiest of my life. It's not necessarily because of the engagement, although that's certainly part of it. Talk to me tomorrow and I could be on the floor crying. Certainly I have some needs that aren't satisfied yet, but at least today I can say that I have a totally amazing kick-ass person I'm in love with and four really great friends. In a bizarre way, it's probably because it's been the least eventful time in my life, so maybe the chaos theory doesn't work."

• "I was a cocktail waitress in a strip club for one night and I started crying because there was so much sadness there. So they fired me. Plus I was pretty sure that pole was really unsanitary. I wanted to go up and Windex it."

• On working at a movie theatre
"The people at the movie theater made me stand outside the door. I would lure male customers into going to see a matinee. It worked. It was kind of a re-release place where you'd pay $2 and the movie had already been out for over a year. I got fired for two things. One - breaking cookies. You could eat them if they were damaged, so they caught me breaking 20 cookies against the wall. Two - I was just supposed to go up and down the aisle with my little flashlight... and of course where Jessica Rabbit comes out and sings her song, I would stick the flashlight under my face and sing along with her really loud and then run out. Eventually they found out it was me and I was axed. It was cruel. It was a good job though."

• "My agent said I have to show a more vulnerable side. It upset me so greatly I was almost crying, because I'm fiercely protective of my spirit. All my life, I feel people have tried to stamp out what's special about me and I've fought for so long. And though I've had more luck than other people, I feel it's been a longer, harder and more solitary road for me."

• "I just think people get used to a diet of beige, and they can't handle it when something shocking pink comes along."

• On the death of her boyfriend
"I was pretty much hanging on by a shred at that point. It was the first big death in my life. You know how you can walk down the street and see a person with a certain look on their faces, like the wind is whistling between their eyes, and know they're a grief-stricken zombie. I was that person."

• On the Children of God cult
"Like many things, I'm sure they started out with good intentions. Meanwhile they're all having sex with each other and going out and getting men drunk and luring them into the cult. They call it flirty fishing. Gross. A lot of kids disappeared. I could be sweeping Ghadaffi's doorstep right now. I can't seem to escape strange Christians with weird beliefs. This girl showed up on the set of Jawbreaker and the next thing I know she turns up at my house, with two little black-and-white Boston Terriers, drives the exact same car as I do, has these same exact shoes that I have on right now and from there she tried to induct me into Scientology. I wanted to, like, exorcise my home afterwards."

• "My friend used to live on top of a funeral home. I used to watch people get cremated. They puff up really big before they explode. Don't get cremated if you care about it being your ashes in the urn. They just shovel some out from a pile in the corner."

• "I'm the person who hides their toilet paper under everything else in the grocery basket."

• "Porno movies scare me. People that are desperate for certain kinds of sex scare me. Like people that could only get it off if they get peed on. God bless them, but I wouldn't want to have to work so hard."

• "I've never come across any uncircumcised men. Actually except for Manson, my boyfriends have always been Jewish."

• On what makes her laugh
"Retarded things. The other day I was driving down the street and there was this row of trash containers, and there was this strange little Japanese woman waiting patiently next to them. And I said, Look, honey, they're throwing away a perfectly good Japanese woman."

• "At my 21st birthday party. I was nervous, I didn't eat anything, I drank a bottle of champagne within five minutes. I danced with a really old man with no teeth….and then I passed out. I remember being in the back of the ambulance, looking up and thinking, 'This is stupid, they should tint these windows'. I don't want to be dying and looking at a fucking J&J King Of Beepers Billboard on my way to the grave, thank you."

• On her relationship with her parents
"They're really different people from your typical parental types. But I'm really close to my brothers and sisters. And both my parents are very... interesting. It's not a bad relationship. It's just not a normal one.''

• On marriage
"I don't think about the institution part of it as much as the idea that marrying the person you're with is the highest compliment you can pay them."

• "I try to bring as much depth as I can to each character. The whole point of acting is to immerse yourself, and with certain kinds of characters or roles you can only immerse yourself now and then. I'm certainly not in any position where I can say, 'Get me this movie'. But I can't understand why some name actresses in my age group make such safe and boring choices."

• "I spend hours looking at pictures of Boston Terriers - I own two, Bug and Fester. I stare until I feel like my eyes are going to bleed."

• "I've had to bake red velvet cakes in the middle of the night because I had nothing else in my house to eat. I'm very Martha Stewart."

• On her favorite candy
"People give me fancy chocolate, but I eat Laffy Taffy, OK? If you cut open my stomach, you'll see giant globs of hydronated purple stuff."

"I chose to swim rather than sink, even though others tried to drown me. They still do. Fuck them."

• On her female role models
"My sisters, my girlfriends, strong women of the cinema who've paved the way, my agent Tracey Jacobs, and all of my favorite heroines - fiction and non-fiction - who've given me the strength to deal with another day. This sounds like an fucking awards show speech. Bette Midler is going to show up and sing 'Wind Beneath My Wings' in a second."

"I have these insane urges. It's like when you're driving on the mountain side you want to drive off the side of it... I was in the middle of the airport and I just wanted to yell, 'I love Osama' at the top of my lungs."