Top 174 Quotes & Sayings by Holly Hunter - Page 3

Once I hit 45, there was a real downturn. But I got an incredibly provocative, delicious lead role in a television series called 'Saving Grace,' and I loved the character.

I moved to New York in 1980, and I met Beth Henley, who's a marvellous playwright and who I have a real personal and professional association with, in 1982. I met her in a stalled elevator - we were the only two people in there - and she's been one of my very dearest friends since.

I'm not a great Maureen Dowd fan, because I really find her poisonous, on the record.

It's not like television is now for women who have been put out to pasture. Television is for everybody.

I think that the audience feels a real connection with Zoe Kazan because she's so instantly lovable.

Actors do movies because you want to make a connection; you want an audience to recognise themselves in what it is that you're depicting.

I am often offered roles or women who are very strong, uncompromising. But it's fun to do 'Manglehorn,' where I'm playing somebody who's very open, very optimistic, very positive. I don't want to bore myself.

I was playing 'The Flight of the Bumblebee,' and I totally forgot the ending, so I performed the whole piece again, and I still couldn't remember it.

Am I going to go to Heaven or Hell when I die? No. Is there going to be a second coming, and people are going to be stricken down? I find all that exclusionary.

It's great to go to the cinema and have a conversation about something that is almost taboo.

Sometimes it's the script or an opportunity to work with an incredible director.

In my career, I've never been a box office name. Granted, a couple of my movies have made a lot of money, but I'd do other movies which make very little money, or they're not seen that much.

Is there a higher energy? I would say yes, even if the energy is collective. Even if it's kind of Jungian, or the whole thing is collective consciousness, that may be God as far as I'm concerned. So is there an energy that's higher than mine? Yes.

Pixar has the integrity to not rush.

As we get older, people close down. We get less adaptive, less flexible - literally. Curiosity can diminish, and you want safety. You want what you know.

There are ways that women absorb situations, and I think women are different kinds of listeners. They're different in terms of how they parse out problem solving.

I don't want to cancel the South out in my life. I carry my Southernness with me. God knows, it's a great place to come from. It's also a place I had to get away from. It is just an endless world for me, so much culture and eccentricity.

I had such total, unequivocal, enthusiastic encouragement to be an actress. Looking back, I really find that to be a total mystery. Don't ask me why. My father was just in love with the idea that I would be an actress.

When the family gets together once a year in Georgia for New Year's Eve, we listen to music, all kinds of music. That's what we do.

So much progress has been made with topics like mental illness and drug abuse and sexual identity.

There are, in terms of numbers, more leading roles for women in television than there are features. That's absolutely certain.

I wouldn't even go spend the night at a friend's unless they had a piano. But I didn't have the chops, the extraordinary talent, to be able to play the piano professionally.

I'm from Oklahoma City, and there's a statue across from the site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building of Jesus. It's called 'Jesus Wept.' And I love this statue because it's a statue of Jesus with his head in his hand. And his sadness and his pain at some of the choices that are made here - that just breaks his heart.

What does it mean to believe rather than to know? To surrender to something that's not fact but faith?

I'm almost 60. I've been doing this for a while. In order to do this for that long, you have to make decisions based on lots and lots of different criteria, you know. I mean, the criteria has to shift, especially if you're an actress.

I've moved laterally, as opposed to vertically. I was never a superstar. I've always had to move between a couple of years of unemployment, where offers are not provocative enough to take, and seasons where I work nonstop for a year.

I started doing repertory theatre in upstate New York when I was 15, went back when I was 16, and by that time decided that I really wanted to study drama seriously and go to an acting conservatory called Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

I'm a practicing Catholic. And faith is very, very important to me. It was pounded in my head as a kid, and I hated it. And I sort of lost my way in my 20s and part of my 30s and then found my way back. And I don't know what I'd do without it. It's huge in my life.

I think that 'Saving Grace' is pretty funny. I think that the show and the woman have a pretty great sense of humor.

The happiest person in the world has struggled. And none of us are perfect. And people can judge. There's so much judgment going on. And I just don't think that's what God's about.

I would say, yeah, I'm a spiritual person.

I don't think it's wrong to make fun of some of the stuff that we think and we do.

It is difficult to love people; even when you do love them, it is difficult to know how - how to express it.

This is one of the reasons I like to act - it's because acting forces you into situations you don't know.

The cool thing about those small-budget movies is that there's a tremendous amount of freedom the filmmakers have since there's less money at stake.

Good female parts are hard to come by, so I go all over the place to find them: cable TV, network movies of the week, foreign films, independent American films, studio films, the stage.

Sometimes it's the lead, but there are not always leads out there, so then it's an interesting supporting character, or there's a lot of dough, although that happens less and less. Let's have a good laugh about that one.

I've never had a career of that kind of box office power. I've always learned the hard way

I'm basically talking to the audience, standing alone, describing the weather. It's very rudimentary, the dialogue, saying what the weather is like that day.

It's not the dress ... it's the way you see me.

I got on stage and I went, "Oh wow. No stage fright." I couldn't do public speaking, and I couldn't play the piano in front of people, but I could act. I found that being on stage, I felt, "This is home." I felt an immediate right thing, and the exchange between the audience and the actors on stage was so fulfilling. I just went, "That is the conversation I want to have."

When you spend many hours a week working with the same people - I mean television operates on really amazing hours and the gift of that is the trust that you feel and the intimacy that you feel with the people who you're working with.

It's the same with people knowing absolutely everything there is to know about an actor. I actually think the more personal information you have about an actor, the more you have to carve out for yourself when you go to a movie and see them in it

Drama is always conflict. Conflict either comes from within or without. The thing that makes a show different is the conflict manifests itself both internally and externally.

I think that my looks through the years have served me well because I was never a great beauty and I was never cast as a great beauty. My looks were not part of my transportation - certainly not in the typical leading lady role - so I never leaned on it and I never really made that a high value.

I would love to work more - I really would - but there is not a lot of stuff around and the stuff that is around is not very complicated; it tends to lie a little flat

I feel that I'm a spiritual person in that I feel like telling stories is a spiritual exercise and I think that it's something that we need as a culture and as humans. We need for people to put stories up in front of us that we recognize ourselves so that we can see - you need to be able to see something in a finite form in order to identify with it sometimes because your life sprawls before you in this kind of way that you can't capture.

More and more movies have been pressured to allow reporters and TV cameras to come onto the set while you're working, and I find that a real violation

The rhythm of my career has always been very static, staccato and then silent, and then a lot of work, and then none

In storytelling you kind of put your nightmares up there, you put your dreams up there and people can see them better because they can stand outside of it and look at it and recognize themselves inside it. So I feel that that in and of itself is a spiritual thing.

I act probably a lot more than you see. I happen to choose movies that don't have much of a life, or I choose movies that are shown on cable instead of as features

Real quality in roles is very hard to come by. Any actor or actress will tell you that. Great movies are hard to come by. It's almost impossible to make one, and most people have to settle for making something less.

In some ways, it would be nice to stay younger, but I feel pretty happy about growing older... Personally, I don't have a lot of the regular hand-ups with getting older that some people do. I've never tried to disguise my age. People find out anyway.

I've never worked as much as I would've wanted to, and that's why I end up doing a lot of stage as well, because stage is a full course meal