A movie set actually can be a good place to have a family atmosphere.
— Frances McDormand
I can do a good John Wayne.
I've made a professional reputation playing working-class, middle-class, American women. There's a real sense of stoicism and pragmatism and strength and lyricism of a woman like that.
No actor has complete freedom.
We appreciate quiet living. It's not exactly a Hollywood way of life - I couldn't stand living out in Hollywood because you can never escape from the business. All people ever do is talk about movies. At least in New York you can have some other life.
Growing up a preacher's kid wasn't the easiest thing. Everybody's always watching you to see how you'll behave - or misbehave.
I haven't done much press for many reasons, but mostly because it's not an interesting dialogue about work that's been done. It's turned into something else. It's become this ridiculous other thing.
If, when I leave this earth, I'm remembered for 'Fargo,' so be it. But I think old Marge Gunderson is gonna get a run for her money with Olive Kittredge.
When you lose a spouse, you're a widow or widower; when you lose your parents, you're an orphan. When you lose a child, there's no word in the English language for that position, that place that you're left.
I've never been someone who needs a lot of takes or enjoys a lot of takes. I like the fast thing of it.
I tried taking a year off when Pedro was a toddler because I really wanted to be around, but it wasn't good for any of us.
I've got a rubber face. It has always served me very well and really helps, especially as I get older, because I still have all my road map intact, and I can use it at will.
My father was a minister, and it was more my mother that had the responsibility of making sure the family put out an outward of appearance of living what he was preaching. She was the PR.
I've always known that I'll have a career for the rest of my life because they'll always make movies about men, and men need women in their lives. But, when it comes to telling a woman's story, they're complex, circular, and not genre-driven.
I learned how to read in second grade, and I entered a summer contest at my local library in Chattanooga, Tennessee. If you read more books than anybody else, you got your Polaroid up on the bulletin board, and I did.
I'm not really interested in promoting 'Olive' as a series about depression or mental illness.
It could be partly my taste. It's just my belief that there are female characters that will benefit from not being vulnerable.
You just have to play the character.
I would disagree that America is any more racist or ridiculous than anywhere else.
I can't do the frappuccino. It's too sweet. I need it straight.
I want to separate my professional life from my personal life. I want to live a normal life and be a normal mother.
I wasn't into sports, but I was really into Shakespeare.
If you want to talk about cultural appropriation, we have to go back to the Greeks.
KWMR is my radio station, and I intend to have a job there as I get older. That's what I'm lobbying for. They don't need me. They've got plenty of people. But let's see if I can make myself indispensable.
At least three times a week, I'm approached by someone who says something about 'Fargo.'
You can't make a rule about it. The minute you make a rule, it's like putting your wedding pictures in 'In Style' magazine - you're divorced.
I'm attracted to male gestures and sexuality.
There is simply too much of my life that is involved in my work that I couldn't replicate in any other way.
I've given just as much of my life to that, and I practiced it with the same zeal, as I have acting. And I think that many of my skill sets from being a housewife I used for producing. Because you don't stop until it's done.
My son smelled like a cinnamon bun, and that smell entered into my biological being, and it became an imperative that I keep him alive at all costs, so then there's this monster - this tiger or lion - that comes forward in you to protect them. And it doesn't stop. It doesn't matter if they become men or women.
I like being my age. I kind of have a political thing about it.
In my theater work, I've had much more three-dimensional, broader-stroke characters.
The last scene in 'Moonlight,' that's one of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen on film in my lifetime. You see two men showing such tenderness towards each other. And it's bold; it's deep. It's complex. It's profound.
I think that cosmetic enhancements in my profession are just an occupational hazard. But I think, more culturally, I'm interested in starting the conversation about aging gracefully and how, instead of making it a cultural problem, we make it individuals' problems.
Unless it's a flat-out farce, an actor can't play comedy on film.
Cinematic icons of the police detective are more male role models than female.
What's wrong with Hell's Kitchen? You don't change a neighborhood by changing its name. You change it by building a school.
I will go to my grave being known as Marge Gunderson. It'll be on my gravestone if I have one. I don't mind that, because it was a great character.
I was very good until I left home to go to a little college in West Virginia, and then I started to break some rules.
My position has always been that the way people age and the signs that we show of aging is nature's way of tattooing. It's natural scarification, and the life you lead gives you the symbols and the emblems of your life, the road map you followed.
People love to drop in 'you betcha' as often as they can.
I have friends who are movie stars, and I think it's just as hard a job as being a working actor. But it's a different job, and it's not the one I want.
I love flying by the seat of my pants, going at something instinctually.
My feminist training was that this was your goal, to be a self-sufficient woman, but that is a miscalculation. It's just not the way we work. We work in dialogue with the community.
If you take it as a compliment that you don't look your age, then you're really shooting yourself in the foot.
I never read books - and still don't read books - to develop them.
We wrote 'Olive Kitteridge' as six hours, and they asked us to make it in four.
I'm really interested in playing my age.
I think that there's a clinical mental illness called depression, but I believe that post-industrial America has been narcotized by progress. There's a cultural malaise - mental illness or no - that everybody suffers from at some point in their life.
There's something healing about tears.
