Sissy Spacek
Some families can experience terrible tragedy and deal with it, and others not. I find those things fascinating.
That was the magical thing about the Seventies: artists ruled. Because films were relatively low-budget, nobody cared. We could just go off and work.
It's not seeing myself 40 feet tall on a movie screen - it's the work. That's what thrills me.
I'm a fool for a brilliant filmmaker. And for someone who wants to try new things.
There's nothing like not washing your teeth or washing your face or brushing your teeth in the morning.
I need to fill myself up with real life. That's kind of the well I draw from.
It's difficult to just let go of a character. Especially after you've been preparing and researching for weeks.
I only learn from the people I work with.
Ultimately, you have to work for your own enlightenment - for smarts - or it gets boring.
If somebody wants to think of me as a movie star, that's fine, that's great. It sort of makes me giggle.
I don't like to do something just to prove I can do it.
New York gets under your skin, and I think once you've fallen in love with New York, you take that with you. I love New York.
I write about Texas, New York, California and Virginia, and they're all important places in my repertoire.
My daughter is far more talented than me in the songwriting department - far more.
I think the movie business, you meet people, and you work intensely with them, and you have these relationships - there's an intimacy to it and a familiarity to the relationship because you're having to let go of all your barriers so you can let people in and work with them.
It's really about the work - if you are doing it for the right reasons - really to illuminate the human condition.
You want to live your life and live it just as fully and as deeply as you can. That's your deep well of reserve. That's where you get all your - the fodder for your work.
I'm a binge-watcher!
It's really nice when the studio is behind what you're doing, because that's often not the case.
Everybody who loves me calls me Sissy, so I guess that's just who I am. When I'm 80, they'll still be calling me Sissy. Oh, well, I guess there are worse things.
Film is an amazing art form, but so is life. When your career and your life can work together, and one can support the other, it's just great.
There's something about Southern characters.
I wouldn't sell those New York actors short.
The human condition is the human condition, and what we try to do is illuminate the human condition.
I think people in the north and the south and the east and the west, anywhere they come from, are just as interesting, and they're humans. They have the same realm of emotions that we all have. But I'm just more drawn to the Southern character and the different types, and Southern literature is so lyrical and so wonderful.
There is a long tradition of pungent living in the South. It was wonderful to have that imprinted on me so early in life. I already had my core when I left my little town in Texas.
When I lived in New York City, I loved it so much. But every six months, I had to go home to Texas to remember who I was. Get filled back up.
My roots allow me to let go of the fear of failure.
My children came along at a perfect time in my life. My career was soaring, and they didn't care who I thought I was. They just wanted to eat. It brought me down to earth.
Living in New York always felt to me like living in the middle of a carnival. It never stopped. There was something very exciting about it.
There are stories you can tell on TV that can't be told in movies anymore.
One day, it just dawned on me that I'm from Texas, and that's what I am.
Texas is so big, and the place where I grew up was so little, and I was such a little thing growing up in the middle of it. I had two choices: I could either spend my life feeling insignificant, or I could look on the life I lived as a microcosm of the universe.
That's what I love about acting and love and drama and art: that humanness we all share.
We like to believe we are in control of our destinies, even though we never are and we never have been.
I feel like if I don't get a film and somebody else does, then that film never belonged to me. The ones I get belong to me.
Oftentimes you read scripts, and you get to one and you think, 'OK, is this good, or is this just better than all the other ones that I have been reading?'
Rarely in film acting do you get to do a scene for very long.
Nature is really big and loud the farther south you get.
I used to play softball every summer back in Quitman. My two brothers demanded I be tough. There were certain girls they wouldn't let me invite over because they were too feminine and fragile.
Nothing in life prepared me for the way I felt about being a mother. Until then, I sort of felt like a blank sheet of paper. I was always trying to second-guess myself, to be what others wanted me to be.
When I was a little kid, I used to spend a lot of time thinking about what I'd wish for if a magic fairy gave me three wishes. First, I wanted to be loved. Then, I wanted to be beautiful. And, finally, I'd wish for a million more wishes.
In every movie, there's always some physical thing that triggers the character for me. In 'The Long Walk Home,' it was the girdle. Every time I'd put that girdle on, I'd feel my character wiggle to life.
Hollywood is like a piranha. They don't give you breathing room. You don't have time to let your career breathe.
I love a lot of the '70s musicians, like Bonnie Raitt. And I love Sheryl Crow. But probably my favorite musician is a woman by the name of Schuyler Fisk.
There are classic horror films that, if you are a human being in this world, you have to have seen. They've become a part of our culture.
I studied homeopathy for years and years. Herbs and all kinds of acupuncture, acupressure, alternative medicine. I think it's just better to treat the whole person.
Hollywood is a film industry, a film business. I don't approach my career in that way. I see it as 'art,' and I become involved in films that ring my bell.
I just make films that attract me.