I've moved laterally, as opposed to vertically. I was never a superstar. I've always had to move between a couple of years of unemployment, where offers are not provocative enough to take, and seasons where I work nonstop for a year.
— Holly Hunter
I don't want to cancel the South out in my life. I carry my Southernness with me. God knows, it's a great place to come from. It's also a place I had to get away from. It is just an endless world for me, so much culture and eccentricity.
Am I going to go to Heaven or Hell when I die? No. Is there going to be a second coming, and people are going to be stricken down? I find all that exclusionary.
I moved to New York in 1980, and I met Beth Henley, who's a marvellous playwright and who I have a real personal and professional association with, in 1982. I met her in a stalled elevator - we were the only two people in there - and she's been one of my very dearest friends since.
Pixar has the integrity to not rush.
This is one of the reasons I like to act - it's because acting forces you into situations you don't know.
It's not like television is now for women who have been put out to pasture. Television is for everybody.
I'm not a great Maureen Dowd fan, because I really find her poisonous, on the record.
Sometimes it's the script or an opportunity to work with an incredible director.
I moved to the city in August of 1980, and someone I thought was a friend had an apartment in this wedding cake of a building, so I slept on her couch for a few days.
I would say, yeah, I'm a spiritual person.
I'm from Oklahoma City, and there's a statue across from the site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building of Jesus. It's called 'Jesus Wept.' And I love this statue because it's a statue of Jesus with his head in his hand. And his sadness and his pain at some of the choices that are made here - that just breaks his heart.
I'm too small and too short. I thought that was odd; that should be a non-issue to me.
In my career, I've never been a box office name. Granted, a couple of my movies have made a lot of money, but I'd do other movies which make very little money, or they're not seen that much.
Sometimes I go, 'Wow, this is a director I really, really want to work with,' like David Cronenberg. I haunted David Cronenberg for years before, and then he offered me a role.
Giving up something personal to the public, you are surrendering something.
Drama is all about the moment of ultimate conflict for a person.
What does it mean to believe rather than to know? To surrender to something that's not fact but faith?
Good female parts are hard to come by, so I go all over the place to find them: cable TV, network movies of the week, foreign films, independent American films, studio films, the stage.
When the family gets together once a year in Georgia for New Year's Eve, we listen to music, all kinds of music. That's what we do.
I wouldn't even go spend the night at a friend's unless they had a piano. But I didn't have the chops, the extraordinary talent, to be able to play the piano professionally.
I am often offered roles or women who are very strong, uncompromising. But it's fun to do 'Manglehorn,' where I'm playing somebody who's very open, very optimistic, very positive. I don't want to bore myself.
As we get older, people close down. We get less adaptive, less flexible - literally. Curiosity can diminish, and you want safety. You want what you know.
The cool thing about those small-budget movies is that there's a tremendous amount of freedom the filmmakers have since there's less money at stake.
So much progress has been made with topics like mental illness and drug abuse and sexual identity.
I was playing 'The Flight of the Bumblebee,' and I totally forgot the ending, so I performed the whole piece again, and I still couldn't remember it.
Is there a higher energy? I would say yes, even if the energy is collective. Even if it's kind of Jungian, or the whole thing is collective consciousness, that may be God as far as I'm concerned. So is there an energy that's higher than mine? Yes.
I don't think it's wrong to make fun of some of the stuff that we think and we do.
The happiest person in the world has struggled. And none of us are perfect. And people can judge. There's so much judgment going on. And I just don't think that's what God's about.
It's great to go to the cinema and have a conversation about something that is almost taboo.
Actors do movies because you want to make a connection; you want an audience to recognise themselves in what it is that you're depicting.
Do I trust myself? Sometimes I don't even know, but I can only just kind of throw my hat in the ring and hope for the best. Depending on how much I trust the other people is how much freedom I can allow myself to have on that particular set.
When you have an actor on set who is playing themselves in a movie that is about the most cathartic, most traumatizing event of their lives, you don't even have to mention that.
The self-help section of national bookstore chains in America is one of the largest sections. In a way, it's nothing new, and in another way, very new. People have always searched for answers; that's why we have religion. People have always been seeking some relief from their own mortality.
I think that 'Saving Grace' is pretty funny. I think that the show and the woman have a pretty great sense of humor.
I had such total, unequivocal, enthusiastic encouragement to be an actress. Looking back, I really find that to be a total mystery. Don't ask me why. My father was just in love with the idea that I would be an actress.
It is difficult to love people; even when you do love them, it is difficult to know how - how to express it.
I started doing repertory theatre in upstate New York when I was 15, went back when I was 16, and by that time decided that I really wanted to study drama seriously and go to an acting conservatory called Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
There are, in terms of numbers, more leading roles for women in television than there are features. That's absolutely certain.
I think that the audience feels a real connection with Zoe Kazan because she's so instantly lovable.
There are ways that women absorb situations, and I think women are different kinds of listeners. They're different in terms of how they parse out problem solving.
Sometimes it's the lead, but there are not always leads out there, so then it's an interesting supporting character, or there's a lot of dough, although that happens less and less. Let's have a good laugh about that one.
I got a horror film, 'The Burning,' and suddenly I was making crazy money, like a thousand a week, so I moved into an apartment on Amsterdam with a guy who was also in 'The Burning,' Jason Alexander.
Do I believe in God? I don't know what that really means. I don't know what my personal connections with G-o-d are. But spirituality is soulfulness.
I'm a practicing Catholic. And faith is very, very important to me. It was pounded in my head as a kid, and I hated it. And I sort of lost my way in my 20s and part of my 30s and then found my way back. And I don't know what I'd do without it. It's huge in my life.
With 'Broadcast News,' it became a non-issue, and with 'The Piano,' it became a non-issue. Both parts were written for more statuesque women. It was nice to change people's minds about that, because that's neither here nor there.
Once I hit 45, there was a real downturn. But I got an incredibly provocative, delicious lead role in a television series called 'Saving Grace,' and I loved the character.
I'm almost 60. I've been doing this for a while. In order to do this for that long, you have to make decisions based on lots and lots of different criteria, you know. I mean, the criteria has to shift, especially if you're an actress.
Each project, I can almost feel like I'm like a different person.
The first and most important thing you need to be creative is to relax, particularly for the actors.
