Quotes

[Entertainment Tonight (1981)] I had it (smoking), it stinks.

[1978] I'm looking forward to bigger parts in the future, but I'm not doing soft-core scripts where the character emerges in half-light, half-dressed.

[on her Lifetime Achievement Award from the AFI] I don't want to spit in the eye of good fortune, but it was weird. I felt like I'd butted in line in front of Lucille Ball, Audrey Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn. Hello? How did this happen? I was only the sixth woman to receive it, but they found 26 men to give it to. I thought that was embarrassing.

[on her view of acting back in college] I thought it was really fun, you've got to understand, but I didn't think it was a serious way to conduct your life. You know, I had a sense of mission. I was a true child of the '60s.

I love doing comedy, but people just don't give me enough of a chance. It's one of the reasons I enjoy The Manchurian Candidate (2004) so much. It's because I actually get a chance to be funny.

Let's face it, we were all once 3-year-olds who stood in the middle of the living room and everybody thought we were so adorable. Only some of us grow up and get paid for it.

[accepting an Emmy Award for Angels in America (2003)] You know, there are some days when I myself think I'm overrated, but not today.

Someone once said that sometimes studio heads don't want to cast films with the image of their first wife in the role. It's just rather unpleasant for them. So they like the idea of the new one.

[on her role in The Manchurian Candidate (2004)] I loved being someone so certain. Because certainty is just so attractive in people. To me, it's a completely bogus position - for me. Because, you know, I'm listening to every side. But it's so nice not to have to listen to all the different sides. To be so clear and on your track and sure. It's a fabulous thing. Unfortunately, it leads to fanaticism.

I think I was wired for family. You know how they say people are wired for religion, or wired for this or that? I always knew I would like to, if I could find the right person, have a family. I can't imagine living single.

I get nervous calling myself an artist. I feel I'm more like an interpreter or a violinist, you know.

[on winning the 1983 Best Actress Oscar for Sophie's Choice (1982)] Oh boy, no matter how much you try to imagine what this is like, it's just so incredibly thrilling right down your toes.

But ... in my own experience of male and female directors, people have a much, much harder time taking a direct command from a woman. It's somehow very difficult for people.

I mean, come on; when you have people writing these things, that you're the greatest thing that ever ate scenery, you're dead. You're fucking dead. How can you even presume to begin a new character? It's a killer.

It's a lesson I learned in drama school: the teacher asks, how do you be the queen? And everybody says, "Oh it's about posture and authority." And they said, no, it's about how the air in the room shifts when you walk in. And that's everyone else's work.

I really, really depend on the other actors for the confirmation of who I think I am," she says. "And so it's important to me to work with good people that are not worried about how they look. You know. Real actors. They're your blood.

[part of her Emmy Award acceptance speech for Angels in America (2003)] Glenn Close is my friend so I know she'll forgive me, Helen Mirren is an acting god, and no one has put a better performance on film than Judy Davis in Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (2001). The only one in the group is Emma Thompson, who will hold a grudge for the rest of her life. But who cares?

[2007, accepting the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical] I think I've worked with everyone in the room! I have!

[on her struggles as an actress earlier in her career] It's hard to negotiate the present landscape with a brain and a female body.

[on winning a Golden Globe Award for Adaptation. (2002)]. I've been nominated 789 times and I was getting settled over there for a long winter's nap... I didn't have anything prepared because it's been since the Pleistocene Era that I won anything.

It would be nice to have a woman President. I think half the Senate should be women, half of Parliament, half the ruling mullahs. But that will never happen, darling!

[on Dustin Hoffman] He's energized and the greatest combination of the generous and the selfish that ever lived. He wants to be the greatest actor who ever was.

I try to lead as ordinary a life as I can. You can't get spoiled if you do your own ironing.

I don't know what I'd do without my husband. I'd be dead, emotionally at least, if I hadn't met him. He's the greatest.

Listening is everything. Listening is the whole deal. That's what I think. And I mean that in terms of before you work, after you work, in between work, with your children, with your husband, with your friends, with your mother, with your father. It's everything. And it's where you learn everything.

[on her marriage] There's no road map on how to raise a family: it's always an enormous negotiation. But I have a holistic need to work and to have huge ties of love in my life. I can't imagine eschewing one for the other.

[on life as a young actress] When I was 20 I busked to afford accommodation. One night I hadn't earned enough, I actually slept in the open in Green Park [in London]. The view was of the Ritz Hotel and I vowed I'd stay there one day. And I have.

I hate the [Oscar] campaigning thing. It's unseemly. You should be honored for something. It shouldn't be for whose campaign was better.

[on her appearance] My daughters had helped me to stop worrying about my appearance over the years. I wasted so many years thinking I wasn't pretty enough and why didn't I have Jessica Lange's body or someone else's legs? What a waste of time. (February 2009)

[2009] I've been nominated for an Oscar 15 times and won twice, but it still feels like it's happening to someone else. I wish I could feel it more.

[on Natasha Richardson's tragic death] Tash was the warm sun in the center of a large constellation of family, friends, all of those lucky enough to know her - she is irreplaceable in our lives; she gave us so much, so generously - her legacy is the love that connects us all.

If you've been married for a long time, you love without looking.

My greatest culinary triumph was when I was falling in love with my husband. We were on the coast of Maine in a cabin and I made an apple pie... just whipped it up, without a recipe or anything... just the perfect pastry. I've never been able to do it again - and he asks for it often!

Turning 60 was important to everyone else. It was a big number, to me it was, 'Well yeah, that comes after 59', and I don't even want to look it in the eye.

[on portraying Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011)] The prospect of exploring the swathe cut through history by this remarkable woman is a daunting and exciting challenge. I am trying to approach the role with as much zeal, fervor and attention to detail as the real Lady Thatcher possesses - I can only hope my stamina will begin to approach her own.

[1994, on if she's bothered when one of her films don't do well at the box-office] I'm horribly disappointed when people don't see what I consider some of my best work. Yeah, I'm very sad. But I know that I have a video life. Most of my fans are home with their children waiting for my films to come out on video. But I'm disappointed because certain things should be seen on the big screen. I was very proud of A Cry in the Dark (1988), but it wasn't distributed widely enough for people to have seen it on the big screen.

[1994, on career choices] What affects your career choices are the three interesting scripts you get in a year, two of which you're wrong for, one you think you might want to do if you're real lucky. You can't possibly plot what's going to be available, what's going to be written, who's going to think of it, and if it will come to you or not.

[2008] One of the most important keys to acting is curiosity. I am curious to the point of being nosy. What that means is you want to devour lives. You're eager to put on their shoes and wear their clothes and have them become a part of you. All people contain mystery, and when you act, you want to plumb that mystery until everything is known to you.

[on The Iron Lady (2011)] It was one of those rare, rare films where I was grateful to be an actor and grateful for the privilege of being able to look at a life deeply with empathy.

It took a lot out of me, but it was a privilege to play her (Margaret Thatcher), it really was. I still don't agree with a lot of her policies. But I feel she believed in them and that they came from an honest conviction, and that she wasn't a cosmetic politician just changing make-up to suit the times.

[on Margaret Thatcher] We on the Left didn't like her policies but secretly we were thrilled that a woman had made it, and we thought, "Wow, if it can happen there in England, it could happen here." But we're still waiting in America.

[on Margaret Thatcher] She's still an incredibly divisive figure, but you miss her clarity today. It was all very clear and up front, and I loved that eagerness to mix it up and to make it about ideas. Today it's all about feelings. You know, "How do I come off?" and, "Does this seem OK?" You want people who are willing to find a solution. I admire the fact that she was a "love-me-or-hate-me" kind of leader who said: "This is what I stand for." It's a hard thing to do and no one's doing that now.

[on what appealed to her about playing Margaret Thatcher] Women and power, and diminishment of power, and loss of power. And reconciliation with your life where you come to a point where you've lived most of it, and it's behind you. I have always liked and been intrigued by older people and the idea that behind them lives every human trauma, drama, glory, jokes, love.

[on Margaret Thatcher] I consider all the roles I play a privilege but this one was special because there are such vehement opinions about her. People seemed to look at her as an icon or a monster and I just wanted to locate the human being inside those caricatures that we've seen over so many years. And to investigate myself what it must have been like for her.

[responding to those who have criticized the emphasis placed on Margaret Thatcher's frail and confused old age] Some people have said it's shameful to portray this part of a life. But the corollary of that is that, if you think that debility, delicacy, dementia are shameful, if you think that the ebbing of a life is something that should be shut away, if you think that people need to be defended from these images then - yes - then you'll think it's a shameful thing.

I was never engaged to John Cazale. We lived together for three years until he died of bone cancer.

[on avoiding cosmetic surgery] I really understand the chagrin that accompanies aging, especially for a woman, but I think people look funny when they freeze their faces. In Los Angeles there's a lot of that. I pick up on the part that doesn't move on a face. I'm immediately drawn to it and that is the opposite of what you're intending. You pull focus on the area that's been worked on.

I gotta thank everybody in England that let me come and trample over their history.

[on her college life] A kid who had read only seven books in high school and was now face-to-face with class valedictorians and full time intellectuals, girls whose idea of a Saturday night was an extra chunk of free time to conduct a biology experiment.

I'm curious about other people. That's the essence of my acting. I'm interested in what it would be like to be you.