Laura Dern

I'm lucky enough that directors sometimes seek me out for little projects that people don't even know about, that just surface later on.

What do you say when someone has truly inspired you? How do you express to an artist how deeply their work has affected you?

I was raised by two actors in a moment in time - the Seventies - when there was no judgment of characters, no heroes and bad guys.

My mother opened a bank account for me when I made $60 on my first day of work as an extra. She's that kind of mother.

I was raised by an actress, and I watched all those women turn 60 and ask, Shouldn't get face work? My mother and Anne Bancroft said, We're not going to fall into that.

Any journey of a creative person has, you know, really unusual challenges and years where you don't work and years where you work.

I have never been someone who applied 'work begets work' to my career, sometimes unfortunately.

A lot of people have asked whether acting is in my genes. I don't know if anyone is born to act. And it certainly wasn't pushed on me. It was something I wanted to do.

I hope we can be consummate artists as women or revolutionaries, or whatever women want to be, and also have love, not only for ourselves but from a partner.

I really don't consider myself to be a conventional Hollywood star. I've never really been marketed by the big studios to do mass market box office films.

I have a very wonderfully, bizarrely amazing relationship with my mother in that we've been through a myriad of emotions because we've acted together and played all these different kinds of mother-daughters.

I was on the cover of a lot of magazines, and there were compliments about beauty and fashion and what I was wearing. Man, if you get locked into that, you can lose your freedom as an actress.

Every role is a new form of surrender.

I was raised in the '70s, and I've worked with people I love, and I've been on sets with my parents, with people who run a set and require of actors a sense of liberty and freedom and exploration and failure into brave achievement.

My dad was always interested in characters he didn't understand - he was such a great bad guy in movies. And that is really the thing that calls me to the material often: something I struggle to understand in human behaviour.

Sadly, half of marriages end in divorce. Half of my girl friends and male friends have been through one, and their kids are doing great. There's no shame around it - unless you want to project that on to yourself - but certainly there's no longer cultural shame. Everyone is walking through it.

I think there are ways to get so caught up in your career and being so heavy and dramatic, and everyone wants to be a tortured genius.

If you're looking to be loved for a part, it's great and enticing to be adorable in a romantic comedy. But then, as an actor, you get stuck.

I knew I wanted to become an actor when I was 7 years old. My dad was working with Alfred Hitchcock, my mom was working with Martin Scorsese - and it was the great summer of my childhood.

Ben Stiller, who I love and who is a friend and is such an incredible actor - he's hilarious, obviously, but I thought his performance in 'Greenberg' was extraordinary.

I always wondered what it would be like to have a normal childhood.

Something that I've cared about deeply my whole career is getting to work with filmmakers and inventors of stories that are hysterical because they are just so painfully true.

I don't think you have to be in these serious, heavy, independent little movies to be an actor. Some of the most interesting acting I've seen is on cable television.

I knew you had to go in and audition and maybe they'd hire you, and that's where you start. I had a good understanding about press: that it's the actor's responsibility to publicize his or her films.

I love being in my 40s.

Stay true to your own voice, and don't worry about needing to be liked or what anybody else thinks. Keep your eyes on your own paper.

I love Clint Eastwood, and I wish to work with him again. He's completely irreverent about everything, including his own beautiful work.

Luckily, I was raised by people who'd already seen all the yuck stuff, which is why they originally didn't want me to act. I understood the difference between getting a part at a Hollywood party and getting a job.

Unfortunately, overall, movies are a conglomerate. People buy and sell people in this business, which can get really ugly.

Growth doesn't hurt. This is what I've learned. In the end, it doesn't hurt. It hurts while it's happening. But in the end, you know, for life, for parenting, and for the arts, it's not a bad - not a bad thing to try for.

When you become a parent, you really care that you get that right, and you care about nothing else.

I tend to always love material with flawed protagonists and morally ambiguous people.

My mother is extremely interested in everything esoteric.

There's something so accessible about heroes who have faults.

As an actor, you're not kind of thinking about your own work or watching the movie for the first time.

Everything's cyclical. Having been raised by actors, I watched their careers, and the challenge is to take time off.

I will be working with David Lynch when I'm 80.

I got picked for very unique and independent filmmaking experiences with auteurs. And I'm so lucky.

My daughter wants to do yoga with me and wants to be in the theater thing, and I can't tell her, 'Don't be an actress.' My son loves guitar and loves to be in a band and wants his iTunes downloaded with all this old-school hip-hop so he understands where hip-hop came from.

I was raised Catholic, and my grandmother taught me to stay. As a teenager, I thought if you went on a date, you should stay for a couple of years. I didn't realize that if he wasn't your cup of tea, you got to leave.

Wild at Heart made a few people angry-they thought I was exploiting women by showing that when a woman says no she really means yes.

'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington' is one of the greatest films of all time.

It would be great to make a movie that had the style of a great '30's film.

I try to do things I love or care about for some reason.

The really courageous and bold thing is to make movies about human behaviour.

When man decides he can control nature, he's in deep trouble.

It's always been a desire of mine to work with my parents.

I know that I've seen a mannerism, or a way I've cried, or something, where I see a flash of my parents.

I don't turn my nose up at anything. If it's a great part, it's a great part. I'd love to do a box-office hit.

Irvin Kershner, no matter what anyone says, has done some great work. 'Eyes of Laura Mars' is an incredible movie.

It's one thing to have forced time off as an actor, and another thing when you actually say, 'I don't want to read anything, and I don't want to talk to anybody.'

Like anything else, acting can become boring - a chore, really - if there isn't any challenge. And I like taking challenges. Just when people think they have me figured out, I like to surprise them.

I'm interested in human nature. That's why I chose to become an actor.

In American culture we are supposed to take a pill when we're depressed or in grief as opposed to actually feeling.

All I can start with is what moves me and feels like a great challenge as an actor and I think is saying something unusual or irreverent or human - honest in some way.

I grew up with a tribe of amazing women, but certainly my mother and my godmother really modeled women as actors.

Unfortunately, I was making comedies in my 20s, but other people didn't realize they were comedies.

You don't always get to work as much as you like, because I'm waiting to find things that I care about. Sometimes that's frustrating.

It's lovely to be considered pretty and lovely to do photo shoots, and I just love fashion. But I'm proud that I did the characters I wanted to do.

If we could all figure out a way to just be true to ourselves and have a good time doing what we're doing, it would be a lot more fun.

Decision-making is very scary for me.

Love means a lot to me, and I love loving, and I love boys.

With 'Mask,' 'Smooth Talk' and 'Blue Velvet,' I loved the specific experiences so much. Each one was a specific filmmaker with a specific vision.

I always wanted to do a 'Ms. Smith Goes to Washington.'

I wanted to go to Jupiter. That was my plan from day one, and David Lynch gave me the ticket.

If you have a movie coming out, and people are talking about you, the amount of scripts will build.

Starting my career as a kid, I was doing what jobs I got.

There are people who consider it almost unpatriotic to be inquisitive and to be truthful about your opinions.

At the end of the day, you have to sit with the scripts and decide where your heart is.

You'll be offered the 'lead' in this new hot film with such-and-such A-list director, 'a fabulous part' - a fabulous part? A fabulous part is a character with a soul, who starts here and goes to there, you know? There aren't many of those.

There are artists or filmmakers or cinematographers who have had long careers who, maybe to reinvent themselves or just to stay in a secure place, layer it on or ham it up, if I can use that expression, or make grand choices that don't feel as authentic as what they did to make us fall in love with them in the first place.

I'm moved by people who see the world differently than others. People who see the world with a longing for its poetry often can be broken people.

For me, the greatest good fortune I have being raised by actors is I came in knowing that a career is the ebb and flow.

For people who feel things in an enormous way, it's pretty hard to live in this world.

God bless nannies.

My favorite books are psychology, self-help, and I'm fascinated by Jung, by dream work.

It's a strange world, as David Lynch would say.

I like to play people who are deeply flawed, and I want to find the good nature in them. I even try to be kind to myself when I've made big mistakes.

I made a commitment to myself; that I wanted to be an actress, and I wanted to do films that make a difference. It has to move people.

It's my deepest interest as an actor: I love discovering how human beings work, how their flaws reveal themselves - how to learn and grow from that - and how characters teach me things as a woman and as a parent.

I was raised on movie sets, and I decided for myself at a very young age that it was what I wanted to do.

Anybody you make a movie with when you're 12 and they're 14, you're going to know them your whole life.

Jealousy is a scary thing.

There are a lot more female writers wanting to direct their own material and hopefully will be given the opportunity.

I'm not averse to being a supporting character. I try to pick parts where I can add something.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is one of the greatest films of all time.

I've always loved film more than theater.

I think it's about not just the crisis you're in, but how do you get to the other side? How do we heal? How do we survive this experience while remaining hopeful instead of filled with despair? That's what interests me.

I'm interested in flawed protagonists. I was raised on them.

Having egregious divorces - where you just hate each other - is really the easy way out.

My dad taught me to never be pigeonholed; to really allow yourself to reinvent characters as they reinvent you; to be bold and to be willing to play seemingly unlikeable people.

That's life - to turn each other on, to feel good, to feel in love.

I like movies about longing and desperation, and dark and light things, stories about people struggling to raise children, and to have relationships and be intimate with each other.

Meditation is a practice that is considered mainstream: The NFL uses it, the NBA uses it, heart patients use it. It's very easy to consider yourself a meditator and not be too alternative-minded.

I've seen 3-D movies where it seems a little crude or too in-your-face.

We like our archetypes and heroes to be what they are at face value. And life doesn't work out like that.

The bad news is, I have worked less than I have liked. The good news is, I can look back on my body of work and feel truly proud of the work I have done.

I've got the sort of personality that requires me to find some sort of release, and for me, it's performing.

To stay true to your art is such a complicated journey, and Dad clearly has done it.

I don't want to mess with my face. So I'm becoming fluent in French so I can go to France and make French films when I'm 60.