Just look at my face. Its an extraordinary experience. All of my friends who are grandparents have been saying, just wait, a bit cynically, but its just extraordinary. You feel like a child again yourself. Just walking on air.

I try to avoid a specific image. I seek to play as many different women as I can to avoid having a label put on me.

I've kept my sanity in this business by trying out for a role and then going home and trying to forget about it.

Mostly, I spend my time being a mother to my two children, working in my organic garden, raising masses of sweet peas, being passionately involved in conservation, recycling and solar energy.

It was in high school that I first became interested in acting. We put on lots of plays.

I loved doing Shakespeare. My two favorite roles, in fact, have been Viola in Twelfth Night and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I feel a little guilty only being an actor.

Acting is really only part of my life. I'm addicted to it.

Actors are very generous.

You learn more discipline in the theatre than you do in movies or TV. You're on stage every night and you have to sustain your energy level tor several hours.

I've been very lucky. I wanted to be an actress, but I didn't really have the drive to sell myself. Fortunately I had a terrific agent in New York who kept me going from job to job.

Onstage or in films, you do affect peoples' lives, and sometimes that's very gratifying. But still, there's this little voice that says you should be doing something that matters.

I think I have a lot of crazy layers.

I've always just adored music. It's my first love, really. I admire and respect people in the music business. You really have to work hard and diligently. Sometimes actors can be lazy and get away with it, but you can't do that if you're a musician.

Maybe subconsciously I've kept activism separate from acting because it's important to me in a more profound way.

I think one of my very favorite films of all time was with Peter Sellers when he played Chauncey, the gardener. Being There.

I feel that its our children who do give us hope because they are the ones who are going to save the world.

I was raised in a time where children were still seen and not heard basically, so I think a lot of us in my generation went the other way and just tried to be as much more liberal and open and we're still paying for it.

Whether you're on TV or on the stage, you have to work hard to stay fresh, real, and full of energy. You can't settle back. You always have to stay on your toes.

Just look at my face. Its an extraordinary experience. All of my friends who are grandparents have been saying, just wait, a bit cynically, but its just extraordinary. You feel like a child again yourself. Just walking on air.

For a woman who's a widow and pretty much a loner, I can walk out, and I'm surrounded by NYU kids. The energy jumps off the sidewalks, and I never feel sad or bored.

I don't read critics, and I don't care what they say. You can't let them steal your soul. You do what the director and production is committed to doing. I just think it's terrible that critics have the power to keep people away from a good production.

I got to Broadway a year after I came to New York. I starred in 'Butterflies Are Free' and got a Tony for it. Right out of the gate. Maybe that's why I wasn't very gracious about it. I wasn't driven. And right after 'Butterflies Are Free', I got married and then started a family. I always wanted that.

I live in New York, and when you're older and widowed, it's a perfect place because you just don't feel lonely there, and, luckily, I like my own company, too.

I really do like being independent, and I don't want to have to rely on anyone else to cart me around if I break a bone.

My family was very musical. My brother is an opera singer; my parents both sang.

My theory in anything you do is to keep exploring, keep digging deeper to find new stuff.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

In my fifty years of experience and memory, I have seen the most amazing increase in the standard of living of a people ever achieved anywhere in the world. This is why I am so sure that our system of free competition and industrial development is sound and must be preserved.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

It's been my experience that every time I think I know where it's at, it's usually somewhere else.