Actress Quotes

Editing yourself is like an irksome coin toss. You've got to strip yourself of super ego and operate from the id. Maybe I've got my Freud mixed up. It's just hard to trade a beauty shot for the performance with truth and a brightly lit zit.

Editing is not a part of the filmmaking process I've ever been privy to as an actress.

Doubt is the middle position between knowledge and ignorance. It encompasses cynicism but also genuine questioning.

Do I pray? Yes. Prayer is very important to me.

As an actor, you're sort of the court-appointed lawyer for the character.

Am I ambitious? I used to be afraid of that word but now I think ambition is a good thing.

The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.

It puzzled me that other people hadn't found out, too. God was gone. We were younger. We had reached past him. Why couldn't they see it? It still puzzles me.

I think God just died of old age. And, when I realized that he wasn't any more, it didn't shock me. It seemed natural and right!

I just knew that God wasn't there. He was a man on a throne in Heaven, so he was easy to forget.

I didn't think then, and I still don't, that I was actually sick.

I couldn't get that same feeling during the day, with my hands in dirty dish water and the hard sun showing up the dirtiness on the roof tops. And after a time, even at night, the feeling of God didn't last.

But I was sure of one thing. If God were a father, with children, that cleanliness I had been feeling wasn't God.

There comes a point when a dream becomes reality and reality becomes a dream.

The more people pointed at me in scorn the more stubborn I got and when they began calling me the Bad Girl of West Seattle High, I tried to live up to it.

That satisfied me until I began to figure that if God loved all his children equally, why did he bother about my red hat and let other people lose their fathers and mothers for always?

I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after I'd had a bath, after I had washed my hair and scrubbed my knuckles and finger-nails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God.

If a person is treated like a patient, they are apt to act like one.

I went to Sunday School and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn't believe them.

I have learned that to have a good friend is the purest of all God's gifts, for it is a love that has no exchange of payment.

I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was... nothingness.

You know, right now, they say - I don't know who says this, but somebody told me - there's three male roles to every female role. And I guess I'd work on evening that up. Making great roles for women. It's just such a huge challenge.

You have to create your own stuff. It's really exciting to create something, sell it, and feel like I'm not just a pawn waiting to be cast.

You have to be willing to accept the idea that people may think you're stupid.

Yeah, I do like scary movies, especially the ones that don't take themselves too seriously.

The hardest thing in my industry is longevity, getting your next job. It's hard to get the first job, but it's so much harder to get the sixth or seventh as a woman.

One of the things that comedy has given me over the years is a really good ability to laugh at myself and to not take things that don't matter too much too seriously. I feel that very little offends me anymore and I'm really grateful for that because I think I was a pretty uptight little kid.

My comedy does not come from a place of deep cynicism, and I tend to play characters who are naive in some way.

I'm not a very good lover. I'm so nervous about my sexuality.

I was never the class clown or anything like that. When I was growing up and doing theatre in Seattle I was always doing very dramatic work. Now I can't get a dramatic role to save my life!