Quotes

I choose projects I can talk about for days because now you do publicity for as long as it took you to shoot the movie.

I feel I've always been on the outside and always on the edge of an abyss. The women I portray, and the woman I am, are ordinary but maybe find themselves in extra-ordinary circumstances, and what they do is at great cost.

Sexuality... is something that develops and becomes stronger and stronger the older you get... If you can continue to say yes to life and to maintain a certain generosity of spirit, you become more and more of who you are.

I think the only reason I remain an actor is that you can never quite get it right. So there is a challenge to it.

If I were 22 and trying to build a career, I don't know who'd be watching the kids as happily as I do. It takes so much to get me to break out of domestic paradise. There's hardly anything that interests me as much as my family.

[on Thelma & Louise (1991) after her nomination for best actress, 1992] I was surprised that the film struck such a primal nerve. I knew when we were filming that it would be different, unusual and hopefully entertaining. But shocking? I guess giving women the option of violence was hard for a lot of people to accept.

People will like you for the wrong reasons your entire life, even if you don't have parents who are celebrities. They will like you because you have a car or you have money or your breasts are big.

You're so lucky in Ireland, England and Spain. Everyone there already knows what it's like to have inexplicable terrorist violence.

The thing that's bad about breasts is that you have to choose between having a mind and having breasts. It'd be nice if you could have both. Anyway, I think my breasts have been highly overrated.

The largest party in the United States is the 50 percent who don't vote.

It's always so painful to watch yourself. That never changes. I still sit there and think, "Oh, that scene is missing? Wasn't I good? What happened there?"

I haven't yet had any plastic surgery, but I won't knock it. I think women have the right to do anything they want to their bodies that makes them feel good about themselves. It's hard to be in this business and be viewed on a screen that's huge. You can see every single line. But I think it's an aesthetic choice for the individual. I don't like it when surgeons take a perfectly interesting looking woman and she ends up looking like a female impersonator with these gigantic breasts. It's just so extreme and that worries me. I think everyone is looking the same.

My children were embarrassed at my Lincoln Center Tribute. I forgot they would show film clips and my children hadn't seen anything. Every time something a little racy would come on like The Hunger (1983), I'd look at my 13-year-old, who was shielding his eyes.

I'm certainly not an expert, but Tim and I just celebrated 17 years together, which in Hollywood years I think is 45. I think the key is just focusing on this one person and not keeping one eye on the door to see who might be better.

I never think about humiliating myself. I keep focusing on wanting to do a good job.

I think one of the reasons I haven't married Tim is that I hate that couples assumption - that once you're committed to someone you stop treating each other as individuals. I like getting up knowing I am choosing to be with that person.

I've always had my mouth open. Whether people listen to me or not, I don't know. But I've always made suggestions.

Every film is political in that it tells you some idea: What do women want? What does it mean to be a man? What is just? What is funny? What can you laugh at? What is not funny? So we notice the ones that challenge the status quo.

I have to decide what to focus on so it doesn't become a joke to see my name everywhere. But I resent it very strongly when people say, 'Oh, this year she's into Central America, but before that it was the homeless,' as if it's some kind of hobby I take up to fill my spare moments. These are all issues that have grown out of a personal fear. Fear definitely motivates my life. It's not a choice about being political. It's just a matter of feeling impotent and waiting for the next horrible thing to happen, or else deciding to make my voice known.

Every traumatic thing I've ever been through, personal, professional, whatever, has always, down the line, paid off somehow. I consider myself lucky.

The difference between theatre and film is kind of like the difference between making love and masturbation.

You have to be careful not to be upstaged by your breasts. I've gotten curvier as I've gotten older. Directors cast the men they want to be and the women they want to have.

I think I've survived because I've gone through a number of incarnations. Sometimes they need somebody sexy. Sometimes they need somebody smart. I've managed to be able to morph myself into parts.

People probably think of me as Debbie Downer. I have become kind of a joke in terms of activism for some people. But it is like worrying if your slip is showing when you're fleeing a burning building. You have to prioritize.

I thought the whole point of feminism is that you're not supposed to be defined by gender. I don't understand the reasoning behind that, because I wouldn't vote for Condoleezza Rice, and I hated Margaret Thatcher.

Despite the statistics, nothing is hopeless, nothing is futile. We can do so much to protect children with awareness, knowledge, and a lot of love.

[on Thelma & Louise (1991)] The thing that separates this from a revenge movie with two males, for instance, is that there is a moral price to be paid by me for losing it, as you learn later, because I had been raped. I go into some kind of little trance there and just overreact. But I think the whole rest of the movie from that point on operates under the knowledge for this character that she is going to have to pay a price, and that there is no joy, really, in that revenge. It was important for me, as the movie went on, to try and figure out why these things keep happening, not to make it about getting even. So we tried in all the rest of the scenes to ask questions, or to make it clear, that she's on some kind of search for an understanding of this moment. When I take off all my jewelry and my watch, I think I'm preparing to go into a zone where she feels she had to pay some kind of a price. That was very much in my mind from that moment on in the film.

[on mothering] Children can reinvent your world for you.

[about people criticizing Thelma & Louise (1991) for its violence and "anti-male" attitude] It shows what a straight, white male world movies traditionally occupy. This kind of scrutiny does not happen to Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) or that Schwarzenegger thing [Total Recall (1990)] where he shoots a woman in the head and says, "Consider that a divorce".

[on the conception of her love scene in The Hunger (1983) and stereotypes men have about lesbianism] They felt that I should be really drunk so that was their way of taking away her choice in a sense, and I insisted that it not be that way, that certainly, you know, you wouldn't have to get drunk to bed Catherine Deneuve. I don't care what your sexual history to that point had been. It was much more interesting that she went voluntarily. [...] I don't think, for better or worse, that women are taken very seriously in this area. I think the feeling is when two women are together, then it's probably experimental or some kind of phase and if the right guy came along, that would all change. So it's actually something that straight men can watch and not be threatened by. And straight men are the ones that are propelling the industry forward, so I don't think it's taken that seriously.

[on relationships] I think the concept that there's one person who's gonna make you whole, this Gibran kind of thinking, is so detrimental. I don't think it's the other person's responsibility to make you whole at all. It's the other person's responsibility to make you laugh, to give you a dance now and then, to read the newspaper and tell you about things you don't have time to read about, to introduce you to music you don't know, to tell you when you're full of shit, to fight fair, to be good in bed, to say, "Come on, let's go have an adventure" when you've become a little bit of a stick in the mud. But it's not their job to make you whole. The test for me of a great romantic relationship is how productive you are during the relationship. You don't need somebody who's gonna keep you up till four in the morning and you don't even know why you're fighting. You don't need somebody who you're gonna go to a party and you're worried about that they're gonna get jealous, laid, drunk, stoned, or turn up missing. I like to go to a party and go my way and let somebody else go their way, and you meet up or you don't meet up and then you go home together and nobody feels bad about it. That's the perfect description of life, too- the party of life. I've been very lucky to find someone. We've been incredibly productive since we've been together.

[on having to do movie re-shoots] White Palace (1990). We shot the ending that was in the book, which is: she sits down, they look at each other, and you don't know what's gonna happen between them. But Pretty Woman (1990) had just come out, and they were thinking, "If we could only get him to marry her and they could have a big laugh." Jimmy [James Spader] and I, we fought and fought, trying to keep our characters intact, but we did two re-shoots on that. On Sweet Hearts Dance (1988), that was a different problem, in that Don Johnson kind of threw the script out. So what happened was we had to do a month of re-shoots at two different times to put back things that had been taken out...The real mistake with that movie was that I thought it was about one thing, and they decided it was about these two guys who were never gonna grow up, a male-bonding thing. And who cares about that?

[on being the eldest of nine children] I was the mother of everybody. And it took me a long time to understand that I didn't have to mother every guy I was with. When I stopped doing that, things got better. When I became a mother, all of these things I had been practicing with grown men made sense, because this was the right time to do it.

I was definitely one of those '60s girls with flowers in my hair and no bra and was influenced by certain drugs of that period, like cannabis or acid. But I always remind my kids that drugs are illegal. Some are a lot of fun, but some can kill you first time out. Mind-expanding drugs - like acid - are very different from the crack and heroin that's around these days. My kids asked me if I used crack, which I thought was funny. I mean, they didn't even have crack then, to show you how far back I go!

I believe in love and trust and commitment, but not in marriage. Marriage may do something for lawyers and mothers, but not for husbands and wives. I deal with reality, with the feelings I have at the moment. And then I go on from there.

[on Brad Pitt and Geena Davis in Thelma & Louise (1991)] The day they did their scenes in bed was the only day they watched the dailies right through, which was suspicious to me. [It] was a very long lunch.

I really respect filmmakers who manage to have lives, do the films the way they want to do them, have a sense of irony and humor about themselves and aren't crippled by the terrible things this business does to you, and how it breaks your heart when films are not released properly.

It's better to have made decisions that turned out badly and learn from them than to feel as if you had no choice and are resentful of the turns that your life takes. My life has been filled with happy accidents. The thing that's served me well is being able to change onto a different track when it's presented itself. [Interview with George Stark, 2014]

[on the death of James Gandolfini] So sad to lose James Gandolfini. One of the sweetest, funniest, most generous actors I've ever worked with. Sending prayers to his family.

[in 1993 on Richard Gere] Richard has been in a lot of good films, but he's never been in a great one.

Men very often can see sex as a way of solving a problem, where women want the problem solved beforehand.

I couldn't live in Hollywood; it's too much of a company town. I never look at the trade papers. I used to, but I was scandalized by reading about actors who made deals before they read the script. How could they possibly do that?

When things are going well, I like to have people to share it with. I've been alone in troubled times, and I don't mind that. Some things have to be endured alone. As Hemingway said, the human being is strong in all the broken places.

[on her split from Tim Robbins] People were coming up to me in the street and saying "I cried and cried when I heard." Well, I was sadder! I didn't think it would ever happen, either.

I am very romantic. For a women of my age and station, I have not been around very much at all. I've never developed that sportive kind of attitude toward sex. Thank God, as it turns out.

Nowadays, I think I look lived-in. When I was younger, I looked blank. Just blank, interchangeable with other people. Now I don't think there's anybody who looks like me.

I see myself as having a little flashlight that lets you get information that you're not getting, and then you make up your mind yourself how to act.

[talking about Prozac] I don't want to go on record as saying that nobody should be on it, but where are the artists going to come from? I think that every birthing is difficult and painful, and that sometimes you have every right to feel angry, and you have every right to feel miserable. And you have to get to the core of what that's about. Medication alone is not going to do it. So I think sometimes you have to just go there. And out of that will come a really interesting person.

I was fortunate that Bull Durham (1988) came along because I'm a working gal and I need to make a living, but I really had to grovel to get that part. The studio wasn't particularly interested in me, and the director felt he had to have people read. Now, in the business, one of the power games is whether or not you read, and I hadn't been reading for many years. But that was one of the few scripts I'd seen where I didn't know in the first few pages what was going to happen, and it was a woman I hadn't seen onscreen before. The only negative review I saw said that the character was a male fantasy figure. I thought she was a female fantasy figure. She was allowed to be everything and not be punished for it--very much like a guy. I felt so strongly about what it said on the subject of following your dream and finding some way to be a success within the framework of your own life. I thought it used one American myth to debunk another American myth about making money and what failure really is.

I'm such a victim of inertia. I need a structure that puts me in a microcosm of some kind.