Junior and senior high school years were not a good time.
— Sissy Spacek
What's normal? I think I'm normal... Maybe I'm abnormal because I get such a thrill from real life, just real life, everyday things.
I'm not paralyzed with fear, but I realize it is important to live as if there's no tomorrow, always trying to maintain your integrity and have no regrets.
You get angry and frustrated wondering, 'Are there enough parts for women?'
There are fewer roles, and I've done so many things already that I don't want to repeat, so to find something you haven't done is harder. I don't want to play a country singer again.
I am a woman of simple tastes.
I'm a flower gardener.
I live a very wonderful life centered in my home and community. We're real involved with the school.
Our life is our life. If we waste it, we're fools.
I just make films that attract me.
I think giving up people is a difficult thing.
There are classic horror films that, if you are a human being in this world, you have to have seen. They've become a part of our culture.
When I first met David Lynch, he was living in the stables of the American Film Institute... He'd work all night and have his crew lock him in during the day, and he'd sleep.
In every movie, there's always some physical thing that triggers the character for me. In 'The Long Walk Home,' it was the girdle. Every time I'd put that girdle on, I'd feel my character wiggle to life.
I used to play softball every summer back in Quitman. My two brothers demanded I be tough. There were certain girls they wouldn't let me invite over because they were too feminine and fragile.
Rarely in film acting do you get to do a scene for very long.
We like to believe we are in control of our destinies, even though we never are and we never have been.
If somebody wants to think of me as a movie star, that's fine, that's great. It sort of makes me giggle.
If you live only a movie-star life, you know only movie-star things. I needed to live a regular life with normal people around.
I think the thread running through most midwives is the passion.
I've done some of my best work in films that fell right through the cracks, so I try to not make career moves but to build a body of work.
I think that we all fantasize about that teeny tiny time in the film industry when women ruled, back in the '40s.
I swore to my parents that no one would ever be able to buy me.
Celebrity status for me came slowly. I wasn't an overnight sensation. I had time to prepare emotionally.
Hollywood's fickle. It's always been that way, and it will always be that way. And it's always going to be somebody new and exciting comes along. That's just the way it works, and it will always work that way. And I think that if you give it everything to the exclusion of your own real life and family, you've sold yourself down the river.
With my coloring, I'm nothing in black and white. I've seen my films sometimes on black-and-white TV. Disaster.
Hollywood is a film industry, a film business. I don't approach my career in that way. I see it as 'art,' and I become involved in films that ring my bell.
I studied homeopathy for years and years. Herbs and all kinds of acupuncture, acupressure, alternative medicine. I think it's just better to treat the whole person.
I love a lot of the '70s musicians, like Bonnie Raitt. And I love Sheryl Crow. But probably my favorite musician is a woman by the name of Schuyler Fisk.
I wanted to be Joni Mitchell.
When I was a little kid, I used to spend a lot of time thinking about what I'd wish for if a magic fairy gave me three wishes. First, I wanted to be loved. Then, I wanted to be beautiful. And, finally, I'd wish for a million more wishes.
Nature is really big and loud the farther south you get.
Oftentimes you read scripts, and you get to one and you think, 'OK, is this good, or is this just better than all the other ones that I have been reading?'
That's what I love about acting and love and drama and art: that humanness we all share.
I loved growing up in a little town. I loved knowing people. I loved going to the store and running into people. I loved going into the store and having forgotten my bag, saying, 'Charge it, put it on my bill.' I loved going to the gas station and saying, 'Pete, fill it up.' I loved that continuity of life.
The business has been good to me.
I've been into exercise my whole life, been a runner and been into health and fitness always.
There's kind of a time you get warned about where the rug gets pulled out from under you: beyond ingenue, before you get into character stuff.
I follow the roles.
I hated country music growing up, but it gets in your bone marrow, kind of like a disease.
I got an automatic breadmaker. It's the greatest! I get more points for that. You computerize in the results you want, and it's no fail. I'm a modern homemaker.
You need to live life to be able to have something to draw from.
I like to do films that I would want to go see, basically. I'm not out to make a fast buck.
For me, life is a bowl of cherries.
My biggest thrill in life is to read in the afternoon until I fall asleep and take a nap.
I'm not Meryl Streep. My God - she's the greatest actor that ever lived. It's sad that ordinary actors like me are compared to her.
Hollywood is like a piranha. They don't give you breathing room. You don't have time to let your career breathe.
Nothing in life prepared me for the way I felt about being a mother. Until then, I sort of felt like a blank sheet of paper. I was always trying to second-guess myself, to be what others wanted me to be.
Nature is my church. The wind in the trees and the bugs and the frogs. All those things are comfort to me.
I feel like if I don't get a film and somebody else does, then that film never belonged to me. The ones I get belong to me.
