Quotes

I don't take part in texting and those other things myself, so I don't really know if people put as much thought into messaging as they used to into writing letters.

A critic is someone who never actually goes to the battle, yet who afterwards comes out shooting the wounded.

Both my parents were actors. I was schooled to think that acting was an important social service, that it was something that human beings need.

Sweat makes good friendship cement.

I think the 20s are a vastly overrated decade. We promise kids that once they get out of school, life will begin and their dreams will come true. But then comes the struggle.

I am a greedy actor in the sense that I like the big bites. Put a big fat steak in front of me, and I will eat it.

Love is as strict as acting. If you want to love somebody, stand there and do it. If you don't, don't. There are no other choices.

Women are usually only interesting to studio executives when they are fecund, between the ages of 15 and 30. I decided to get through the really tough patch, around 50, by just cutting my price and playing ten years older. I didn't want to have to wait until I was an old lady to play one.

You know, my hair is very upsetting to people, but it's upsetting on purpose. It is important to look old so that the young will not be afraid of dying. People don't like old women. We don't honor age in our society, and we certainly don't honor it in Hollywood.

I went into the family business. To me, it was the norm and not the exception.

My time on television began, and I started playing victims. I did about 10 or 12 years of them, which gets boring, right?

I don't have a waist: I'm a breadbox on top of legs.

I was raised to be in service to something larger than myself. A lot of actors concentrate on what they will get out of the profession, rather than what they can offer it. The way I see it, if you come with something to offer, you can offer it forever.

I am pretty sure that all young human beings have, at one time or another in their growing-up, been actors. They have used their imaginations to carry them away from painful or confusing situations... have imagined themselves to be more powerful or beautiful or brave or loving than they are.

The art of acting is to pitch good. You do the pitching and hope that the other person catches the ball and does some good pitching back to you.

I do games of solitaire when I get home to quiet my spirits.

My job always is to play a person, not to judge her.

I believe imagination to be a uniquely human gift. The reason I like my job, and have liked it for more than half a century, is that I get to use my imagination.

I'm not glamorous, I don't have a look, I don't know anything about opera, I have no Italian, and I'm too old.

I'm sorry I didn't wear paint this morning. I tend not to wear it unless I'm getting highly paid.

I'm interested in playing old ladies because I am becoming one. And I want to become a very good one!

I never played the 'decoration', I always played the one who suffered. And then I got very lucky in my middle career, when I started playing the hero, which at that point was quite rare for women.

The director's job is full of all sorts of annoyances and details - like how many cars are on the street. Ugh. I don't want it. I like my gig. And I feel that for the next 30 years or so I can keep learning more about it.

When I got married, my marriage was illegal in 17 states because my husband had a different skin color than I did. And we saw those laws go down one at a time.

I don't want people instructing me what to do with my body; I don't want the government to tell me what I can do in my bedroom, with my body, or with whoever I choose to love.

Many more people saw me on television than will ever get to see me on stage, but I do love being in the same room as the people I'm telling the story to.

In sixth and seventh grade, my two best friends and I pretended to be horses. Every day after school, we would gallop around, whinnying and stamping our hooves and tossing our manes - for hours.

I think mothers get a raw deal in American culture, so I've been defending them. I have three daughters, and I know that as they become mothers, they got a lot more gentle towards me!

There was this wonderful trick of going to the theater with my parents and sitting in the audience under the watchful eye of an usher, and then these other people would come on the stage: They spoke differently and had different clothes and hair. Afterward, they would come back, and they were my parents again. It was magic.

Before Cagney & Lacey (1981) we didn't follow officers home to find out what they did when they took their badges off and emptied their guns. So the idea that these women also had lives outside of work was really interesting to play.

On working with her daughter Kathryne: A couple of summers ago we did The Agamemnon. That was really thrilling because it was not only playing with Kathryne, which is always fun, but going back to the big guys, the old guys, the classic guys. That's pretty delicious. She was also on Judging Amy for a while but they didn't want to put us together much because we look quite a bit alike when you see us side by side. She was playing a character that bore no relationship to Maxine Gray. We also did a picture called The Wedding Dress together.

What I like is the acting itself. But I'm a lousy celebrity. I'm not interested in selling my private life. I take my private feelings to the work, but I want there to be a difference between me and whoever it is I'm playing.

Oh yes, this is my third grandchild and my second granddaughter. She came on the 12th of May and it's Kathryne's first child. My daughter, Alisabeth, has two teenagers so this new one is a great joy.

The first time I was nominated for an award for professional acting, I was in my mid-twenties. I was married and the mother of my first two daughters. I had been working for near to 15 years.

I wish it was possible to do the work and not have to talk about it, but it is traditional in the theater to go into the village square and bang the drum and say, "Come see this show, come see this show.".