Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Patricia Arquette

Frankly, there is no shorter shelf life other than that of a child actor, than that of the ingenue.

Hippy people had a hopeful idea of what they wanted the world to be like, then most of them changed into corporate Yuppies. But I still have that hippy thing underneath somewhere.

I don't read my reviews, but I have a bunch of them and I will when I'm 80.

Neither of us entered marriage thinking it wouldn't be a strain. Life has strains in it, and he's the person I want to strain with.

We all go through life living in little bubbles, which we share with people who think pretty much the same as us.

I think everybody wants love, and everybody wants to feel alive.

If we don't allow people to vote in America, what is our democracy? It's a sham.

Financiers don't support their directors to cast properly. They don't have the vision of an artist. They're casting to spreadsheets, and it's making movies very mediocre. The movie business used to just be called the movies. Now it should be the business movies.

I need space to grow and get old and be a human being. I don't want to be trapped in your ingenue bubble. And I don't agree with it either, by the way.

There really is a lot of pressure on actresses to look a strange and unrealistic way. You're not supposed to age. You're supposed to be perpetually incredibly attractive because that's the way the movie world is.

I've crafted a really weird career for myself.

This idea of the world expecting you to remain an ingenue forever - it's a very short shelf life if you're going to commit to that as your career, and I knew that early.

I grew up in a hippie commune so I have a real hippie part of me.

I love small weird art movies, and I love free mass entertainment.

I didn't want to be looked at. I remember when I was six or seven asking my mom why people were looking at me. She said, 'They're looking at you because you're a beautiful little girl.' But I didn't believe her. And yet I put myself in a business where people have to look at you. I think I learnt to block it out.

Every single lesbian and transgender woman is a woman.

I'm a person who takes baths in the dark, alone.

I liked the premise of this material. I love the marriage relationship. They kind of keep each other honest, and they enjoy each other's sense of humor. Kind of a sexy but boring relationship.

My dad was an alcoholic, growing up, so I knew how scary that was from a child's perspective - the volatility.

We all have our own little thing, I think.

We never thought 'Boyhood' was ever gonna become Oscar-considered. Our shooting budget was $2.8m for 12 years. Altogether. I didn't know if anyone would see it or appreciate it.

I feel like I'm getting the best parts of my career in my 50s.

In Hollywood, nobody knows how much everyone is making. It's all very hidden, and it's hard to change those things.

I didn't think of myself as beautiful, but, in retrospect, I guess I was.

Some people will stop a scene and demand a mirror and look at themselves and check which angles they're being photographed from. I don't do that.

Everyone should help women. Everyone has a vested interest.

You want your partner to objectify you.

I know I've been really blessed in my life.

For some people, when you walk into a room, what your fame means to them can be like pointing a weird gun at them. It triggers something. They might get really giggly or flirty or cold or confrontational.

I find that men are far more vain than women.

I think we've told a lot of lies about human behavior through film.

When I was tiny, I was a real observer of human behaviour, and I knew I wanted to tell the human story, but I felt shy and unattractive and awkward.

I don't have a goal but I just want to work on movies that I really like.

I don't think I would have had much of a career if I didn't have my son.

There was a time when only men could provide or work, and still a lot of countries are like that. But there's a price to be paid for that when you're expected to be the full-time caretaker and you're expected to be the full-time breadwinner.

There's tens of millions of families with single mothers who are living at 100 to 200 percent below the poverty level and these are not women that are on welfare, these are working women. How different would there life be if they're making an extra 40 to 60 cents to the dollar. We can't do this to our kids anymore.

I hope some of your DNA transferred to me.

I think there can always be beauty in struggle.

It's always beautiful to see people striving to grow.

As a teenager, you have so much energy and hormones and you feel powerless in your life.

It concerns me when people frame the conversation about equal pay about the entertainment business. I don't want the wage gap issue to be viewed as this myopic problem, because it's not. It's in 98 percent of all businesses, and it's easy for people to dismiss this conversation when they think it's around white women entertainers. But this is about all women in America.

If you emote in your performances, people feel connected to you as an emotional person, because that's how we communicate. That doesn't mean people know you. At a certain point, I think you have to just be your own self.

When the woman is getting paid drastically less than the male, that whole family is impacted.

There are a lot of parts of who I am that no one in the public has ever known, but the older I've gotten, the more I've appreciated my own strange little self and come to terms with that.

Mothering is one of the most beautiful experiences of my life.

Part of what I love about getting older is realizing that there's something perfect in the imperfection. It's all very human.

I'm excited about the state of women's spiritual life and interior life and who women are. I wish the political establishment would catch up, because we still don't have equal rights in America.

To really be known and really let someone else be known is very vulnerable. It's a weird thing. Just being an actress in Hollywood is very vulnerable. To let all these other people decide whether you're really of value or not, you have to really be strong to know that, of course, they have a right to their opinion, but their opinion doesn't matter as far as yourself.

The United States has more women and girls in prison than any other industrialized nation on earth.

I know when we were really little, my mom would say to me, "If you can, the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning, just get quiet and ask God, 'Who is Patricia?' You can feel your own nature and know who you are."

I'm the only nerd with a piece of paper.

Every day that a woman is making less money, that's less money she has in retirement.

Love is a vulnerable thing. Falling in love is like a great drug. But then to really be known and really let someone else be known is very vulnerable. It's a weird thing.

Love is a vulnerable thing. Falling in love is like a great drug.

Things are very rudimentary as far as women's rights really go here, and it seems fine, but once you start scraping the surface, you start to see the ripple effect of how not having equal rights is so detrimental and how many mothers are single parents trying to raise their families.

I know that I've had a very fortunate life, but also I think my job as an actor is to connect emotionally to human beings.

Of course, a lot of courtship and dating is about sexual attraction. If you're an attractive person, you have that sort of interest from people, whether you cater to it or not, but when you get older, that's not really the leading thing anymore.

To every woman who gave birth, to every citizen and taxpayer, it's our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women of the United States of America!

A lot of being an actor is being something that people imagine you to be.

What I did find out because I grew up with a lot of chaos early on: sometimes, you're born into a family, and their norm is already in your red zone of dangerous feeling or feeling too chaotic. You don't get to really do anything about that when you're a kid.