Holly Hunter
I grew up on a farm. The worst-looking chickens are the best layers. The ones that are the scraggliest... those are usually the ones that are really cooking.
I think that, initially, I was most passionate about music and particularly about playing the piano. I started playing when I was nine, and I was obsessed with it, really. I wouldn't even go spend the night at a friend's unless they had a piano. But I didn't have the chops, the extraordinary talent to be able to play the piano professionally.
I found acting when I was 14, when I got cast in the chorus in a high school play, 'The Boyfriend.' In my high school, we did mainly musicals, so I just started doing nothing but musicals for years and loved it.
To me, being creative is a very fragile thing. The environment in which one can create is a very particular one, and somehow, I've always felt the need to be very protective of that.
Often, in the movie business, they need somebody who will garner box office because they need to pay for the movie. So the people who are in movies that make a lot of money are the people who most often get cast in studio pictures. In my career, I've never been a box office name.
'Saving Grace' was a full stretch-out - literally, physically, spiritually, psychologically. And I needed to take a year-and-a-half off when it was over.
Sometimes you have to marinate instead of making a quick decision. I appreciate my instincts, but my instincts can be dead wrong. Circumspection can give you time.
With longevity comes, 'Nothing is going to kill me; I cannot irreparably damage my career.' Those days are over. The most I can sustain are fender benders.
People have always searched for answers. That's why we have religion; people have always been seeking some relief from their own mortality.
'Top Of The Lake' is a great story with a beginning, and a middle and an end, about darkness - it's like the heart of darkness. And everybody has got one. When I was reading it, I couldn't put it down, and I wanted to know what was going to happen next.
In storytelling you kind of put your nightmares up there, you put your dreams up there and people can see them better because they can stand outside of it and look at it and recognize themselves inside it. So I feel that that in and of itself is a spiritual thing.Collection: Dream
I got on stage and I went, "Oh wow. No stage fright." I couldn't do public speaking, and I couldn't play the piano in front of people, but I could act. I found that being on stage, I felt, "This is home." I felt an immediate right thing, and the exchange between the audience and the actors on stage was so fulfilling. I just went, "That is the conversation I want to have."Collection: Home
I've never had a career of that kind of box office power. I've always learned the hard wayCollection: Careers
I feel that I'm a spiritual person in that I feel like telling stories is a spiritual exercise and I think that it's something that we need as a culture and as humans. We need for people to put stories up in front of us that we recognize ourselves so that we can see - you need to be able to see something in a finite form in order to identify with it sometimes because your life sprawls before you in this kind of way that you can't capture.Collection: Spiritual
It's not the dress ... it's the way you see me.Collection: Dresses
I think that my looks through the years have served me well because I was never a great beauty and I was never cast as a great beauty. My looks were not part of my transportation - certainly not in the typical leading lady role - so I never leaned on it and I never really made that a high value.Collection: Thinking
Drama is always conflict. Conflict either comes from within or without. The thing that makes a show different is the conflict manifests itself both internally and externally.Collection: Drama
Real quality in roles is very hard to come by. Any actor or actress will tell you that. Great movies are hard to come by. It's almost impossible to make one, and most people have to settle for making something less.Collection: Real
In some ways, it would be nice to stay younger, but I feel pretty happy about growing older... Personally, I don't have a lot of the regular hand-ups with getting older that some people do. I've never tried to disguise my age. People find out anyway.Collection: Nice
I act probably a lot more than you see. I happen to choose movies that don't have much of a life, or I choose movies that are shown on cable instead of as featuresCollection: Happens
I'm basically talking to the audience, standing alone, describing the weather. It's very rudimentary, the dialogue, saying what the weather is like that day.Collection: Standing Alone
When you spend many hours a week working with the same people - I mean television operates on really amazing hours and the gift of that is the trust that you feel and the intimacy that you feel with the people who you're working with.Collection: Mean
The rhythm of my career has always been very static, staccato and then silent, and then a lot of work, and then noneCollection: Careers
More and more movies have been pressured to allow reporters and TV cameras to come onto the set while you're working, and I find that a real violationCollection: Real
I would love to work more - I really would - but there is not a lot of stuff around and the stuff that is around is not very complicated; it tends to lie a little flatCollection: Lying
It's the same with people knowing absolutely everything there is to know about an actor. I actually think the more personal information you have about an actor, the more you have to carve out for yourself when you go to a movie and see them in itCollection: Thinking
I've never worked as much as I would've wanted to, and that's why I end up doing a lot of stage as well, because stage is a full course mealCollection: Meals