Quotes

I'm sure there are people who think I'm a bitch, but all I do is strive for perfection. I expect others to work as hard as me, but I'm not demanding to an unreasonable point.

The truth is you can have a great marriage, but there are still no guarantees.

There's this idea that if you take your clothes off, somehow you must have loose morals. There's still a negative attitude in our society towards women who use a strength that's inherent - their femininity - in any way that might be considered seductive.

Time is an amazing equalizer. I think if you stay true to yourself and keep moving forward, things come around.

On the changes made to Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" (she starred in the adaptation): In truth, not very many people have read the book...the ultimate message of "Hester Prynne" would have been lost if we'd stayed with the original ending.

I didn't want to work and drag my kids with me while they were trying to cross this huge transition. I wanted them to become as stable and as confident as possible. There are people who go through this and don't have the financial means, but I did. It wasn't a risk; it was the right thing to do.

Once you've tasted a bit of success, it's more challenging. We have to continue to be willing to take a risk so that we don't get too safe. Unwillingness to risk failure is always there, but it gets harder when you feel you have more to lose. So the better place to keep yourself in is out of your comfort zone, willing to try even at the risk of failing. And that's not natural to me at all. In fact, it's completely unnatural.

I think we all want the same things. We all want to feel loved, and feel a part of something, but we all have self-doubt no matter where we came from.

[on plastic surgery] It's completely false, I've never had it done. It's a way to combat your neurosis. The scalpel won't make you happy. For the moment I prefer to be a beautiful woman of my age than try desperately to look thirty.

[to Susan Boyle] You have nothing to lose - just keep sharing your light.

I don't think anyone could imagine it, but with Redford, all of a sudden, I was very shy and more self-conscious. This was THE Robert Redford and he's a kind of shy and reserved guy.

I'm honored if I can inspire somebody else.

[on her approach to acting] It's 100 percent instinct. I haven't had years of learning in acting class. It just didn't go that way for me. Not because I ever felt I was so wonderful I didn't need it. I'm sure I could use plenty of guidance. Actually, I was too insecure to want to take that path. I always just felt that if I got in a class and somebody said, 'Boy, you're really not good, and maybe you should consider something else,' I would have had to, and I thought that if I could fake it long enough maybe I could figure it out. There's that old saying, 'Fake it until you make it,' and I think I might have been skating on that thin ice for a while in the hope nobody would find me out. I never even really had the ability to put myself in that kind of learning situation until right before I did Ghost (1990), when I worked in New York with a teacher named Harold Guskin. I enjoyed it, but being in a class would probably still be intimidating for me.

The press is a big machine that runs of its own will, and to fight against it would take too much of my focus and my energy. All I can really do is try to find the safest way I can to use the press for positive things - promoting what I love, the movies I make. The rest of it, even though sometimes it hurts, sometimes it's disappointing, sometimes it's unjust, I just don't want to get caught up in it. I've seen what the press does to other stars, and I know I'm no exception. Everybody has their day. Sometimes it's a good time for you in the press, sometimes it's just your turn to get hit. There seems to be no rhyme or reason, no matter what you're doing or how hard you're working. Except you do see that sometimes it comes like the tide - if it's been a really good time for you, the press starts looking for reasons to bring you down, and if you're really down it seems as if they start to jump on a bandwagon so they can be the creators and bring you back. So I just try to ride the wave.

I do take a stand about how a scene should be played. I have a passion for my work, and that sometimes triggers creative conflicts.

I have no obligation to be politically correct.

[on About Last Night (1986)] Some of the critics didn't like the happy ending. But there was no way you could have any other ending on that movie. After building up compassion for the characters, to just throw it away with an unhappy ending would have been stupid.

[on working with Michael Caine in Flawless (2007)] Fantastic. I have to say, I've certainly grown in having a greater appreciation for who he is. I realized actually, when I was 20, when I did the film [Blame It on Rio (1984)] playing his daughter, we didn't have the resource to be able to watch his films like we have today. Young actors now can go back and find everything. For me to have really been that familiar, I would've had to go to those arthouses and really waited to get that little sliver. So now I really have a greater appreciation, which hopefully we do as we get older anyway.

[on women in combat] If there are women, whatever that percentage might be - two percent, five percent - if they have the desire, if they have the ability to match up on an equal standard, then I think we want them there, because that just means somebody's found what they're supposed to do in their lifetime that they're good at. And if they have the passion to create that kind of commitment to be there, why shouldn't they be?

[on 1950s anti-abortion laws depicted in her film, If These Walls Could Talk (1996)] The shame and degradation that these women faced - that is really what is criminal.

[1985, on being dubbed a member of the "Brat Pack"] I hate it! I find it embarrassing, hateful and demeaning.

I used to say that I attended 48 schools, but I think it's something over 30. I attended six high schools, and I always had at least two schools in every grade. Sometimes I made three moves in one grade. My shortest stay was two months.

[2005] In his own way, Ashton is romantic. We were apart for awhile, and he phoned me and said he'd shaved his leg. One leg. Because then at night, he said, it's like sleeping with a woman when he rubs against himself.

Some of my lowest points were the most exciting opportunities to push through to be a better person.

There's nothing wrong with having a desire to want nice things. It's when we place that as a measure of the value of ourselves that it goes askew.

[at a briefing on Domestic Sex Trafficking in Washington, D.C., 5/4/10] As long as one person is enslaved, we are all enslaved. As long as we continue to allow these young women to be criminalized, the message we're putting out is that women and girls can be bought ... It's time that we bring the dirty little secret out into the open.

There was a point in my career that I was being encouraged to do a film for what felt like the wrong reasons, which were for monetary reasons. But I had an overwhelming sense of intuition that it wasn't right, that it felt unsafe, that there were elements that really just were wrong. And what's interesting is, I didn't follow my intuition. I allowed myself to be persuaded. And the biggest part of why that was created is that I didn't have enough self-confidence or trust in my own information.

[presenting Ghost (1990) at the ArcLight Hollywood, April 2013] It's something that touches people's heart, it transcends and has comforted people's soul in great loss and it has instilled a sense of hope and magic that those we love are always still with us. I'm truly grateful to have been part of this film, and I'm honored to be sharing with you tonight. I thank AFI and Target for bringing together this magical night for you to see it on the big screen.

I'm sure there was a huge boon in pottery classes that they hadn't seen since macrame, Birkenstocks, and hairy legs were in fashion!

[1992] I want to be a mogul. Don't get in my way.

[1996] My children bathe with me, and I walk around naked.

Shame is something that's taught and/or a conditioned response. It's not something that we naturally feel.

[on her character in Blind (2016)] I think she's a woman who was not living a truth or a reality, but a life that on the outside looked as if she had everything. Then her world collapses, and she loses everything-her footing, her identity and her sense of direction. She no longer has a compass, and she's pointed in a direction that's revolting. That ends up, in fact, saving her.

[in Movieline magazine, January 1993, about her so-called entourage of bodyguards] What that writer didn't want to put into her article is why these people sometimes have to be in my life. When you get calls from your agent saying, "We just received a call from a mental institution. A man there is telling them he wants to kill you. He's having delusions, we don't know whether he's on narcotics, we don't even know if he's given us the right address," wouldn't you do something? Then, you know, he's been released but the address he had given as his home address isn't even a real one. Or you get weird letters or people show up at your house, thinking your husband is the character that they've seen in a movie. It would be stupid not to protect myself when situations like that arise and when the media continues to print how much my husband makes. If something ever happened, God forbid, I would just feel stupid not to have protected all of us to the best of my ability.

My basic perception of how things have to work to get things done is: group effort. Everybody that works with me is part of my team. It isn't about catering to my needs, my whims. It's about the best idea winning in the end.

The strongest feminine statement I can make is: Be supportive of women who make conscious choices for themselves.

[from a 1988 interview with Bobbie Wygant] The best way to deal with life is one day at a time. I can prepare for the future, but only in so much as what I can do today, 'cause this is all I've got.

You never run out of goals, never. Not unless you want to stop really living. There are people who are happy to stay within parameters, but for me, that would never have been enough.

I like girly things, delicate things. I like dolls, I like toys, I like Barbies. I wish I could articulate this as I really feel it, because it has strong meaning for who I am. I am very much a girl's girl. I have a lot of girlfriends, I do a lot of girl activities, and I take girl vacations. And I work with mostly women. But I guess that there's a part of me that feels that when my femininity is showing, I'm very exposed.

I'm very accessible, and I've had an openness in a lot of the characters that I've played that's inviting to people. I'm kind of a plain Jane. That's my strength.

I look better when I'm in love.

I got a lot of the wild stuff over and done with early.

There was a time when to be considered a serious actress, you had to almost NOT look good. To be glamorous was considered a weakness. Now, I'm grateful that I can say, 'Wait a second, I want BOTH.'

[on Nastassja Kinski] We know each other in a way that no one else could.

[in a 2011 twitter response to the question of her name being "Demetria Gene Guynes"] No it is just Demi Gene it was never Demitria!

If I see it as possible, it is possible.

America is built on puritans, religious fanatics and criminals.

Helen Gurley Brown told me I looked healthy when she really meant to say I looked fat. She said, 'My, aren't you a healthy girl!' ... I should say that I have nothing against her even though she said such a mean thing to me. And it was a clever way of saying it, to be fair.