Top 114 Quotes & Sayings by Sigourney Weaver - Page 2

I used to be terribly shy, so I was either shy or over the top, and I always had a difficult time.

I'm a natural golden retriever at heart. I'm fine with that now, but there was a time when I tried to keep myself from jumping up on people. I had to make myself sit.

Writers write these male stereotypes, and it makes it ten times more interesting if a woman says the lines.

There's something to be said for going right into people's living rooms. I think actors have always loved that medium - you're right in there with people in their homes. A lot of very audacious work is being done on television.

I think that every piece has its challenges. I love going back and forth between one and the other. I'll always pick a comedy over a drama.

I have a very commercial appetite. I don't like to do high-brow things.

Here's a vice: I say yes to too many things. I wish I had the guilty pleasure of saying no. My goal is to try to do less, but more fully.

I made fun of myself before everybody else could, so I always got the comic crowns: Freshman Fink, Sophomore Fairy, Junior Birdman. I got all three of them!

People who run environmental groups and things like that, who have to listen to all kinds of nonsense and keep their tempers, are very diplomatic and very inclusive.

When I'm making the movie, I absolutely do. I work so hard, and out of the raw material that is the script and talks I have with the director, the writer, I create, I hope, a very specific person who wouldn't have otherwise existed. However, do I then attach and hang on to the finished product? No. The experience of the creation of the character is what feeds me, what excites me, challenges me.

What I love about the 'Alien' franchise is I would do all kinds of films - dramas, comedies, whatever - and every now and then I'd be in this science fiction blockbuster that would re-introduce the character and me to a lot of audiences around the world and allow me to go back and do the smaller films again, so it was really a good balance for me.

I think that's what I really dig about science fiction these days - we've caught up to it in a way. It's no longer about people with huge brains. Now it's really much more, as Jim Cameron says, the nature of being human. What it is to be human in society. How to retain one's humanity in society.

When I was in college, I was an English major, but I was part of this great group at Stanford called the Company. We didn't know any better, so we did it all; we did King Lear, we did Hamlet, new plays ... And we did it all in a covered wagon that we took around the Bay Area. We all put our makeup on in one cracked mirror. It was the most fun I've ever had.

When I went to Yale, I thought it would be like in Stenford 24 hours a day. Robert Brustein, former dean of the Yale School of Drama and founder of the Yale Repertory Theater was there, and we did all this very serious - I would go so far as to say completely humorless - Eastern European drama, as well as August Strindberg, and Henrik Ibsen, we weren't allowed to do William Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill. I was not in the right place.

As long as your robot isn't programmed by like Dr. Evil, I think you're going to be fine.

I guess it's a pretty common experience while making a movie. You have to let go of the result and just hang on to the experience and the process, where each role takes you to a different country, as it were: You're shipwrecked on this new island, you have no clothes, you have to figure out how you're going to live in this new character. All of that turns me on.

My mother said, "Pack your bags and leave." And my father said, "I've already paid for a year and a half - why don't you stay and get the degree?" And I said, "That's a good idea, because then I can at least run a theater even though I have no talent, and I'll never be an actor." It's my fault that I believed them.

It's very hard to find a good comedy. I prefer doing comedy far over anything else because I think they're actually more profound. But finding a good one and a great ensemble is very difficult to do and I'm delighted that in these particular times there is so much interest in comedy and that comedy is having so much success.

When you hit your strive, and you feel confident in what you're doing and in your process, you really want to do more and try lots of different things. I've also really worked on my breathing, which is a funny thing to talk about, if you're not an actor. I think breathing is actually the key to a lot of opening up of other parts of yourself that you haven't used, for any job, but particularly in acting.

Please, God, please, don't let me be normal!

Whether it was work, marriage, or family, I've always been a late bloomer.

In Yale they convinced me I had no talent, even though I was always working. They cast me mostly as prostitutes and old women, and I stayed because I loved the writers. I loved Chris Durang and Wendy Wasserstein. I was always doing their work in the Yale Cabaret.

What I love about Neill's Blomkamp work is that his stories are small human stories. But what's interesting about Neill's movies is that they're set in the future but they're so incredibly timely that it feels like maybe in the present in the next dimension. It feels like it's happening now. The universe is very recognizable, in many ways.

Sorry men, but I think boys are a little more oblivious in high school. Girls are just more sensitive. We're so concerned about how we look and how we're doing.

Don't depend on other people's encouragement. It's never enough and never when you need it.

Some of the most intense affairs are between actors and characters. There's a fire in the human heart and we jump into it with the same obsession as we have with our lovers.

I am a person who goes out without a purse. I put things in my coat pockets, so I don't have any accessories.

Never burn bridges. Today's junior jerk, tomorrow's senior partner.

I think so many families are touched by illness and loss, and we kind of overprotect our children often, you know, we sanitize.

In the past, 'Avatar' would have won because Oscar voters loved to hand out awards to big productions, like 'Ben-Hur.' Today it's fashionable to give the Oscar to a small movie that nobody saw.

I've always been very shy and sheltered; I think it was a good way of starting to communicate with people. I was taught as a child never to talk about myself, never to talk about my emotions. Of course, now I talk about myself constantly. Now I have to take reverse est.

When you're young, there's so much that you can't take in. It's pouring over you like a waterfall. When you're older, it's less intense, but you're able to reach out and drink it. I love being older.

Most people think that animals are third-class citizens. Very few people really see animals as "the others" with whom we inhabit this planet. They have equal rights with us.

I'd rather have a small part in a movie I love than a bigger part in one I don't care about.

It's always the script that's going to lure me. And I don't really care about the part.

I am sent too many mainstream scripts in which the older woman is really quite grotesque. Sometimes you read a script and you feel quite sick that they have to caricature older women in such a negative way.

I wouldn't recommend it, because art school is a funny business. Yes, if you can find a situation where they'll give you money to live at the school and do whatever you want and pay for all your materials, if you're a painter or maybe a filmmaker, do it. But acting should be the most fun thing in the world; you're surrounded by other people who are as obsessed with Anton Chekhov as you are.

Art school is a very difficult thing to run in a generous, humane way, because academic power is somehow very corrupting.

I never think about Wall Street - why should I - but to go down there so often while filming 'Working Girl,' to become acquainted with this whole different world, and to find out what goes on behind the scenes is so interesting. There's so much of the city that you don't really bother to investigate. Ahh... New York.

I actually have a long apology letter from Robert Brustein, saying, "I'm so sorry this happened to you. I didn't realize the people who were running the acting department at the drama school hated actors." They did. And they were fired when I graduated.

Someday hopefully it won’t be necessary to allocate a special evening to celebrate where we are and how far we’ve come…someday women writers, producers and crew members will be so commonplace, and roles and salaries for actresses will outstrip those for men, and pigs will fly.

Once I put that wig on, I didn't say an intelligent thing for four months. My voice went up. I walked differently. I'd ask incredibly stupid questions.

Acting as a career is a long term thing and that work is kind of progressive and you can build on a career. It's part of the great tradition of the theater to me.

I can do five things at once. I'm tapping my foot, I'm opening my mouth and talking to you, and looking at the bulletin board.

Only someone who believes in marriage would be married five times.

James Cameron thinks we can do anything. He'll let you try anything. There are very few geniuses in the world, let alone in our business, and he's certainly one of them.

I actually think the reason I am interested in certain parts is because I was such a dweeb in high school. When you are such a loser, it's a helpful way in to a lot of characters because even very powerful people are not all that powerful really. They all had a high school. That vulnerability is completely permanent and, as an actor, it's a good thing.

If one is married for a long time, and one does have a family . . . It is like an energy, a wonderful fire that never goes out underneath you, to help you go out into the world and do your damnedest.

Most of life is hell. It’s filed with failure and loss. People disappoint you. Dreams don’t work out. Hearts get broken. Innocent journalists die. And the best moments of life, when everything comes together, are few and fleeting. But you’ll never get to the next great moment if you don’t keep going. So that’s what I do. I keep going.

It is one proof of a good education and of true refinement of feeling, to respect antiquity.

I think I have always tried to do the smaller films. I like to jump around and there is something really nice for acting in a smaller film... But I think now, Hollywood's movies certainly involve a younger generation for the most part and so... I love going back and forth.

It's rather rare when you play an older character in a movie in a supporting role to even get an arc.

Carbon dioxide pollution is transforming the chemistry of the ocean, rapidly making the water more acidic. In decades, rising ocean acidity may challenge life on a scale that has not occurred for tens of millions of years. So we confront an urgent choice: to move beyond fossil fuels or to risk turning the ocean into a sea of weeds.

After I left Yale, we were all doing these mad plays off - off Broadway. And I got back to that feeling I had from college, of everyone making up in front of one cracked mirror, which is what I loved - the scrappy theater idea. I think off-off Broadway healed me, made me an actor again, and I was in so many different crazy shows.