You can watch someone on-stage cry and cry - but in the audience you feel nothing. It's easy to become indulgent. For me, what's important is the story first.
— Laura Linney
People can't really place me. They're not really sure who I am. Sometimes they think I'm Helen Hunt. Sometimes they think I'm Laura Dern.
I just want to say, 'Go work! It doesn't matter what it is. Work begets work. Just go!'
I could have gone to the gym for three hours a day and bought into all that, but I just wasn't interested.
I'm lucky because I don't like being in the sun a whole lot, just because the repercussions for me - I feel it, I go very red.
I hope that anyone I worked with wouldn't exploit our relationship.
I get cold - really cold - when I travel.
My parents were divorced and I would spend weekends with my father.
It is always good to explore the stuff you don't agree with, to try and understand a different lifestyle or foreign worldview. I like to be challenged in that way, and always end up learning something I didn't know.
Fear, anxiety and neurosis: that's just in the suitcase when you're an actor.
What people can survive and what they don't survive is shocking to me. Someone can go to Iraq and be blown to bits and survive. Someone can trip and fall on the street and they die - that's that.
The entertainment industry is terrified of silence.
I don't think you should exploit your own pain.
I believe that no matter what you do in life, if you learn the basics through theater, it will help you in everything else - problem solving, communication, discipline, all of that stuff.
I don't want to spend my life in my 40s feeling bad about being in my 40s, and then all of a sudden I'm 50, and I will have missed a whole decade!
I had learning disabilities, and I couldn't express myself in the written word.
I'm sure my father had more to do with my career than I would like to give him credit for. I would love to think it was all me!
The only really conscious decision I made was to cast my net wide and if the work was good, to do it.
With big, emotional roles it's very easy, especially if you've grown up in the American school of acting, to exploit your own pain. You have to be careful about that, because 9 times out of 10, your pain is not appropriate to the character.
I always laugh to myself when I listen to some really big A-list star saying that they are just a normal person.
Fame didn't happen to me in my 20s, it has been a gradual thing which probably makes it easier to deal with.
If you have two parents who have to work, who want to work, you need to have someone to guide your child.
I certainly didn't have a nanny.
My family is from the South, and I can remember all those ladies I grew up with, like my great-aunts, who had handkerchiefs. There's something sweet about them.
I am very lucky, because for the most part people are very nice to me, and I am still able to go about my life and ride the subway and all that.
What I find so interesting about people is the choices they make, and how that effects their behavior, their sense of self and their relationships.
All the things that most kids hated, I loved. I loved that things were asked of me and that, much to my surprise, I was able to do them. I loved the 10 o'clock bedtime. I loved the responsibility.
I just have to concentrate on doing what I do.
When your life is being threatened there's an instinctive urge to fight. You fight for the time you have, for your relationships.
My experience is that's rare - that you have a script that is... what they call 'film-ready.'
What I love about a play is that it's such an investment because only time can create a lot of what happens onstage.
I find the whole disdain for ageing crazy.
What I hope in my ideal world is that with each project, I'll either get to work with a really great script that would force me to grow, or work with a really great actor who will make me better.
You know when someone's over-flattering you in a way. You smile but you can't believe it.
I'm profoundly lucky. I really like it. I really like my work. I've liked it since I was 5 years old.
I tend to make low-budget movies but, yeah, I make more money than I ever thought I would make.
I can scarcely stand to have a manicure. I have to have them because you don't want to look like a disgusting human being - it's self-care and it has to happen, but I get very restless.
Tanning is tricky, because a lot of people just look orange.
I grew up in Manhattan on the Upper East Side.
I'm very hard on my bags because I tend to carry a lot of stuff with me.
I love 70's music.
I am very aware that playwrights, particularly good ones, have a intention for everything they write. Language and punctuation is used specifically, and most of the time actors can find wonderful clues about character in the rhythm and cadence of the language used.
I've seen the greatest actors in the world, transcendent talents, who can't find a home.
I crave a cone of silence every once in while.
I'm not someone who likes to have my picture taken, let alone see it plastered all over the place.
A lot of what is publicized now is really pretty trivial stuff - you know, what I eat for breakfast, where I have my pedicures, questions that I just cannot for the life of me understand why someone would want to know that.
I'm absolutely doing what I enjoy.
I enjoy learning about different periods and people, and then taking what's universal about the human condition and seeing where it matches up. No matter where you are, certain things unite everybody.
Comedy is a way to make sense of chaos. It's a way of dealing with things that are overwhelming, that threaten you; it's a way to survive and get closer to the truth.
I have an instinct to want to be part of a group of people. I feel safe there. That's why I was in school for so long.
