Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Yeah, I did need a lot of breath [to play Margaret Thatcher]. I needed much more breath than I have, after all of my expensive drama school training. I couldn't keep up with her.
I've been making a lot of pasta. It's easy. There are unusual tastes that you can combine. I cook because my kids like a certain kind of thing and then they want it over and over.
Life is all about making choices and I'm very happy with mine. I have had a wonderful time raising four children and I've also been lucky to have the support of a wonderful husband.
I get nervous the more time I have to think about something so I deliberately don't give myself too much time between jobs. I take a big break and then I start working again usually.
I can't do a lot of things, like golf. I don't like golf. I mean, I really don't, because I tend to like things that I can do right away. If I can't do it right away, I don't like it.
That consciousness of quality, and the need to demand it can galvanize your energies, not just in your work, but in a rigorous exercise of mind and heart in every aspect of your life.
You're perfectly balanced because then you effervesce seemingly effortlessly. And it's a thing a person can't manufacture. You either have that or you don't. You have charm or you don't.
All an actor has, I think, is their heart, really,...that's the place you go for your inspiration. If my heart wasn't filled with them, where would I get stuff? What would I have to express?
On every film, the clothes are half the battle in creating the character. I have a great deal of opinion about how my people are presented. We show a great deal by what we put on our bodies.
To imagine myself in different ways comes from my beginnings in the theatre. People are more accepting when you go 'apparently', 'wildly' afield from who you are or where you were brought up.
You can't strategize falling in love, can you? It's never worked. People love you the most and set you up, and it doesn't work because you can't predict these things. You fall in love serially.
If you have been touched by the success fairy, people think you know why. People think success breeds enlightenment and you are duty-bound to spread around like manure. Fertilize those young minds!
It's a good thing to imagine yourself doing something you think you can't. I do that every day because, basically, if I had it my way, I'd just stay home and think about what I'm having for supper.
I go to a lot of movies where people are all around me laughing, and I feel like I'm from outer space because I find it dangerous and stupid and horrible and degrading to women and all these things.
We change who we are to fit the exogenous of our time, and not just strategically or to our own advantage, sometimes sympathetically without our even knowing it for the betterment of the whole group.
But for me, it [singing] was a way to get out the feeling of the song, and also to get out the feelings that, you know, roil in high school, to express something that I had no other way of expressing.
The biggest lesson I learned in my career was to ask other people what they make because the men usually make more than you do. And it's good to know. You're not allowed to ask...but it's good to ask.
My success has depended wholly on putting things over on people, so I'm not sure that I'm that great a role model. I am, however, an expert on pretending to be an expert on pretending to be an expert.
When criticism comes your way as an actor they are not criticizing your writing or your painting or your piece, they are criticizing you! It is hard to put that away in a place where you are not hurt.
Well, I got better after this, and my entire family really did appreciate it. Usually, they're resentful of movies that I go off and make, but this one had a bonus attached. But yeah, she had no breath.
First I'm going to thank Don because when you thank your husband at the end of the speech they play him out with the music and I want him to know that everything I value most in our lives you've given me.
They filled our lives so much, the films they were in made us laugh, think and cry. Through their work they shared a piece of our soul. We will miss them with the sadness with which we miss an old friend.
I think that we pay much more attention to fashion and our hair, skin and foreheads, our abdominal muscles and shoes than what is happening in the world. We willingly take that 'drug' and go along with that.
I say to myself, 'I don't know how to act - and why does anybody want to look at me on-screen anymore?' ... Lots of actors feel that way. What gives you strength is also your weakness - your raging insecurity.
I think it is typical for many men to have problems when their wives make more money then they do, or when their wives are higher on the corporate ladder than they find themselves. I think that often is an issue.
A man has always been seen as someone who works hard and has a full-time occupation. I think women should have the same opportunity and not have any stigma attached to them if they choose to pursue their careers.
I think we all think we sound really good in the shower, where there's that nice reverb, and the water's drowning you out, and there is some liberation in the freedom of being totally alone and really going for it.
I really worked very hard to bring my voice back because I used to have a good voice, and to try to do my exercises that I remember from Yale and all the things in the olden days, clearing your sinuses and all that.
There have been directors that I did not enjoy working with, but for the most part I realize that I have been unbelievably spoiled in my career because I have worked with some of the greatest, greatest directors ever.
While I am overwhelmingly proud of work that I, believe me, did not do on my own, I can assure you that awards have very little bearing on my own personal happiness, my own sense of well-being and purpose in the world.
The movie that makes me cry is Anchorman. I have the biggest crush on Will Ferrel I love him in every film he does. I mean, Ryan Gosling could be my child. I'm not going to have a crush on a child. Will Ferrell is a man.
I thought, "Why? and how did we evolve with this weak, and useless passion in tact within the deep heart's core?" And the answer as I've formulated it to myself is that empathy is the engine that powers all the best in us.
My daughters had helped me to stop worrying about my appearance over the years. I wasted so many years thinking I wasn't pretty enough and why didn't I have Jessica Lange's body or someone else's legs? What a waste of time.
Leave me to the thing I love. I love acting. But being called 'the greatest living actress' - a designation not even my mother would sanction - is the opposite of good or valuable or useful. It is a curse for a working actor.
I've thought a lot about the power of empathy. In my work, it's the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a fictional character in a made up story, it allows me to feel, pretend feelings and sorrows and imagined pain.
My mother was someone that walked into a room and lit it up. She made friends easily and she communicated her enthusiasms with great joy. I always wanted to be more like my mother than I am. I loved and admired her very deeply.
It's so much easier to be happy. It's so much easier to choose to love the things that you have, instead of always yearning for what you're missing, or what it is that you're imagining you're missing. It is so much more peaceful.
They were showing clips from my earlier films. All I could see was this beautiful young woman who was anxious about whether she was too heavy or if her nose was too big. I felt like saying to her, 'Just relax and it will all be OK.
Women are better at acting then men. Why? Because we have to be. If successfully convincing someone bigger than you are of something he doesn't want to know is a survival skill, this is how women have survived through the millennia.
She [ Anne Hathaway] is just a delicious talent. I think she can delight us for years and years in lots and lots of different things.Her own personality is so appealing and fresh and open and warm. I think she can have a unique career.
Acting is being susceptible to what is around you, and it's letting it all come in. Acting is a clearing away of everything except what you want and need - and it's wonderful in that way. And when it's right, you're lost in the moment.
Service is the only thing that's important about love. Everybody is worried about 'losing yourself' - all this narcissism. Duty. We can't stand that idea now either... But duty might be a suit of armor you put on to fight for your love.
People will say to me, ‘You’ve played so many strong women,’ and I’ll say, ‘Have you ever said to a man, “You’ve played so many strong men?”’ No! Because the expectation is [men] are varied. Why can’t we have that expectation about women?
I didn't really like opera. I liked cheerleading and boys and, later, smoking. So my opera career was cut short when I was 15. My dad got sick, and we couldn't afford the lessons, so I stopped and became a cheerleader and wrecked my voice.
Disney, who brought joy, arguably, to billions of people, was, perhaps, or had some... racist proclivities. He formed and supported an anti-Semitic industry lobby. And he was certainly, on the evidence of his company's policies, a gender bigot.
I have a very clear understanding of what my voice is. It's like a B voice. It hovers around B-minus, B-plus. I have great friends who are wonderful singers, and I know I'll never be able to do that. But singing through a character is something I can do.
I've grown up well, partly because there weren't great girls' literature - Nancy Drew, maybe - but there weren't things. So there was Huck Finn and "Spin And Marty." The boys characters were interesting and you lived through them when you're watching it.
In my own life, I have noticed when I have been meeting directors, that the same sentence with the same inflection can be said by a man, like: "Get me this." But if the same thing is said by a woman, it's seen as harsh and unacceptable. That always fascinates me.
I have a lot of people to thank and I'm going to be one of those people that tries to mention a lot of names, because I know just two seconds ago my mother and father went completely berserk and I'd like to give some other mothers and fathers that same opportunity.
My own sense of well-being and purpose in the world. That comes from studying the world feelingly, with empathy in my work. It comes from staying alert and alive and involved in the lives of the people that I love and the people in the wider world who need my help.