I spent 10 years in New York doing theater.

I like people-watching and fading into crowds.

I've always just gone with the best role, and I don't care if it's in theater, film or television.

I was such a dork. I was too big. I was really gangly.

I'm a strong person, but I'd never resort to violence.

I literally felt like a freak, which is another aspect of the role of Sally that I relate to: total outsider.

I was voted Biggest Ham and Likeliest to Become a Celebrity.

I was a full foot taller than any child my age.

It was only when I moved to New York that I realized tall is good.

I really came out to L.A. to take the money and run.

I think Janeane Garofalo is incredibly funny, and I love Dennis Miller.

To actually be allowed to be beautiful is a total first for me.

I want to play a Disney villainess so badly.

I don't consider myself a goody-goody, but I like to be perceived as classy.

If you love it, and work really hard at it, it will really happen, I believe. I'm living proof.

I was born in Washington, D.C., and I was raised in Milwaukee.

My way was not to be the petite, gorgeous, little cheerleader. My way of getting by was making people laugh.

When you're that tall, people talk about it all the time.

And to be different is great. You don't want to be the same.

Onstage, I was never the ingenue.

I am, uh... a 6 foot tall woman, I feel like I'm a healthy size, I'm not anorexic; and I feel that people who aren't anorexic are punished... for not being anorexic.

I'd so much rather people think I was funny than pretty.

May I say, if you were suddenly put into a woman's body, wouldn't you be slightly interested in your breasts, and why people look at certain parts of you, and why certain parts move like they do?

I spent 10 years in New York doing theater.

But this show reminds me that there are other aspects to me besides the fact that I'm a funny chick.

I dont consider myself a goody goody but I like to be perceived as classy.

I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

To do theater you need to block off a hunk of time.

In a theater, the part is mine and I can control it as I want to. In the movies, I don't have direct contact, and I am fighting technical machinery.

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.

I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it's business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don't love what you're doing and you can't give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You'll be an old man before you know it.

Actors get pigeonholed very quickly, particularly movie actors. In the theater, one is more used to casting people against type and trusting that their talent and skill will get them through.

I love making people laugh. It's an addiction and it's probably dysfunctional, but I am addicted to it and there's no greater pleasure for me than sitting in a theater and feeling a lot of people losing control of themselves.

I don't think there has been any increase in sophistication in the audience. When people are aware of a concept that's easy to understand, and there's an actor who will attract them to the theater and it's a movie that's funny three-quarters of the time, it will be successful.

Sheer flattery got me into the theater. Flattery always works with me, particularly the flattery of women.

Actually, I didn't like Dartmouth very much, but the whole theater scene I really liked.

I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language.

It was very natural for me to want to disappear into dark theater, I am really very shy. That is something that people never seem to fully grasp because, when you are an actor, you are meant to be an exhibitionist.

In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.

You have to transmit to them what it's like being in the theater. And it has to come from somewhere inside you and not by being like what somebody did last year.

Unless an entire row of people got up in the middle of a performance and left the theater in disgust, I felt as though I hadn't done my job.

I'd also like to do a play. I've never done theater, and constantly changing and refining a performance is something I'd like to do, even though it may sound like work to some people - and it probably is work.

The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.

And I'm in favor of that because I have a gay son, who's a very successful theater designer.

Characters are an extreme form in Shakespeare's theater.

I started acting when I was 10, doing musical theater. I was a brunette at that time. I was always cast in all the exotic parts.

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

I really would rather have gone to New York, since all my training had been in theater, but I didn't have the guts to go there alone. I knew only one person in New York, and that was a man. What I needed was a woman. That's the way Southern girls thought.