Sigourney Weaver
I'm very happy with the opportunities I've had.
When I was in college, I did sort of want to be a journalist. Being an actor, you kind of have the same interest. You go into a story, and you tell it from your point of view for people who aren't there. That's what an actor does with a character. But the real life is more more interesting.
I think indie films are really important, because they show the studios and the audiences when they see them, great stories. Really interesting, small stories.
Every time there's a really good story, there's women in it. We may not get as many roles, but the roles we get are really good, I think, for the most part.
What I perceive in science fiction is that it's more about how everything looks than what's going on, which I think is just difficult if you're an action character. I think they are about character, not about what it looks like.
We need to do a better job of keeping oceans healthy.
I often meet young directors who, you know, had a 'Ghostbusters' picture on their wall as they were growing up. And it's really nice. It just shows how inter-generational our industry is.
For the camera, particularly, I feel like - I think that, as human faces become older, they become more interesting.
I was discouraged at drama school, along with most of my peers.
It won't be long before the Facebook generation will be rejected by the non-Facebook people who will be rejected by the post-Facebook people. Everyone will be on their own planet.
People are amazed that I do comedy. I always did comedy.
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!
I used to be terribly shy, so I was either shy or over the top, and I always had a difficult time.
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.
Writers write these male stereotypes, and it makes it ten times more interesting if a woman says the lines.
I have a very commercial appetite. I don't like to do high-brow things.
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.
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.
Don't depend on other people's encouragement. It's never enough and never when you need it.Collection: Encouragement
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.Collection: Dream
Never burn bridges. Today's junior jerk, tomorrow's senior partner.Collection: Senior
Please, God, please, don't let me be normal!Collection: Normal
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.Collection: Inspirational Life
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.Collection: Animal
It is one proof of a good education and of true refinement of feeling, to respect antiquity.Collection: Family
I'd rather have a small part in a movie I love than a bigger part in one I don't care about.Collection: Care
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Weed
Whether it was work, marriage, or family, I've always been a late bloomer.Collection: Tardiness
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.Collection: Letting Go
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.Collection: Interesting
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.Collection: Stupid
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Sick
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.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Drama
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.Collection: Crazy
Art school is a very difficult thing to run in a generous, humane way, because academic power is somehow very corrupting.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Thinking
I am a person who goes out without a purse. I put things in my coat pockets, so I don't have any accessories.Collection: Pockets
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.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Talent
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.Collection: Running
It's always the script that's going to lure me. And I don't really care about the part.Collection: Care
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.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Drama
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.Collection: Character