Love is as strict as acting. If you want to love somebody, stand there and do it. If you don't, don't. There are no other choices.

A critic is someone who never actually goes to the battle, yet who afterwards comes out shooting the wounded.

Love is as strict as acting. If you want to love somebody, stand there and do it. If you don't, don't. There are no other choices.

I'm interested in playing old ladies because I am becoming one. And I want to become a very good one!

I'm sorry I didn't wear paint this morning. I tend not to wear it unless I'm getting highly paid.

You know, my hair is very upsetting to people, but it's upsetting on purpose. It is important to look old so that the young will not be afraid of dying. People don't like old women. We don't honor age in our society, and we certainly don't honor it in Hollywood.

Both my parents were actors. I was schooled to think that acting was an important social service, that it was something that human beings need.

I am a greedy actor in the sense that I like the big bites. Put a big fat steak in front of me, and I will eat it.

I am pretty sure that all young human beings have, at one time or another in their growing-up, been actors. They have used their imaginations to carry them away from painful or confusing situations... have imagined themselves to be more powerful or beautiful or brave or loving than they are.

I don't have a waist: I'm a breadbox on top of legs.

I don't take part in texting and those other things myself, so I don't really know if people put as much thought into messaging as they used to into writing letters.

I never played the 'decoration,' I always played the one who suffered. And then I got very lucky in my middle career, when I started playing the hero, which at that point was quite rare for women.

I think mothers get a raw deal in American culture, so I've been defending them. I have three daughters, and I know that as they become mothers, they got a lot more gentle towards me!

I think the 20s are a vastly overrated decade. We promise kids that once they get out of school, life will begin and their dreams will come true. But then comes the struggle.

I was raised to be in service to something larger than myself. A lot of actors concentrate on what they will get out of the profession, rather than what they can offer it. The way I see it, if you come with something to offer, you can offer it forever.

I went into the family business. To me, it was the norm and not the exception.

I wish it was possible to do the work and not have to talk about it, but it is traditional in the theater to go into the village square and bang the drum and say, 'Come see this show, come see this show.'

I'm not glamorous, I don't have a look, I don't know anything about opera, I have no Italian, and I'm too old.

My job always is to play a person, not to judge her.

My time on television began, and I started playing victims. I did about 10 or 12 years of them, which gets boring, right?

Sweat makes good friendship cement.

The director's job is full of all sorts of annoyances and details - like how many cars are on the street. Ugh. I don't want it. I like my gig. And I feel that for the next 30 years or so I can keep learning more about it.

The first time I was nominated for an award for professional acting, I was in my mid-twenties. I was married and the mother of my first two daughters. I had been working for near to 15 years.

There was this wonderful trick of going to the theater with my parents and sitting in the audience under the watchful eye of an usher, and then these other people would come on the stage: They spoke differently and had different clothes and hair. Afterward, they would come back, and they were my parents again. It was magic.

What I like is the acting itself. But I'm a lousy celebrity. I'm not interested in selling my private life. I take my private feelings to the work, but I want there to be a difference between me and whoever it is I'm playing.

When I got married, my marriage was illegal in 17 states because my husband had a different skin color than I did. And we saw those laws go down one at a time.

Women are usually only interesting to studio executives when they are fecund, between the ages of 15 and 30. I decided to get through the really tough patch, around 50, by just cutting my price and playing ten years older. I didn't want to have to wait until I was an old lady to play one.

It was always part of the plan to move into acting.

Be where the acting is. I live in Houston. Dallas is 4 1/2 hours away. I let them know there's no difference.

My mother keeps things in perspective for me. She makes me realize that the acting I do and love is no more important than what one of my brothers does-he works in a shoe repair shop. If my career ever tapers off, I'll go to college.

In Hungary, acting is a career for which one fits himself as earnestly as one studies for a degree in medicine, law, or philosophy.

I think acting is about forgetting yourself in order to give the best of yourself. It's passing through you more than you're creating it. You're not the flower, but the vase which holds the flower.

In LA, too many people want to go the quickest route from A to B. Method acting offers them that.

I don't see it as a form of healing, because if you have wounds that are bleeding I don't think acting will ever get them to stop. But I find acting is a form of illumination.

Maybe I can't act, but I know the gimmicks. I studied acting all my life and know what's good for me.

I know that if I'd had to go and take an exam for acting, I wouldn't have got anywhere. You don't take exams for acting, you take your courage.

I'm not acting, but I am acting.

I've done a lot of acting. I'm not saying I'm the greatest, but I'd love to act, I'd love to sing.

I had a bonding problem when I went off and boxed for five years. I was over in Europe and Asia fighting because I wanted to do something different; I was tired of acting. But the thing is, when I was done doing that, I couldn't get a job.

Acting for me is not that quid pro quo.

If you're acting, then there's a prescribed way to behave; whereas in life there's no prescribed way. So acting feels like a comfortable way to get through the day.

When I was a kid, the idea of why I wanted acting to be the thing I do for the rest of my life was different. It was, Oh yeah, I'll get girls and be famous.

And then, I suppose, there's also a cinematic reality on top of that. Because it was extremely difficult to keep tabs on, it was quite confusing acting that.

I read. It's also nice for me to get involved in schoolwork, which is a totally different world than acting. It makes me feel like I am doing things that normal people are doing at my age.

It's a living, breathing thing, acting.

A few nights ago I went to a Hollywood screening of a small independent film made by Sally Kirkland, an old friend of mine who also did terrific job acting in it. There were other actors in it and they were all terrific.

Plastic surgery and breast implants are fine for people who want that, if it makes them feel better about who they are. But, it makes these people, actors especially, fantasy figures for a fantasy world. Acting is about being real being honest.

I don't see my dancing or acting as two separate things. I don't define them separately, so I can't say one has helped the other, It's all the same thing. More than anything I love being on stage and performing.

In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.