“For me, life is a bowl of cherries.”
“There’s a real danger in trying to stay king of the mountain. You stop taking risks, you stop being as creative, because you’re trying to maintain a position. Apart from anything else that really takes the fun out of it.”
“I lived an idyllic ‘Huckleberry Finn’ life in a tiny town. Climbing trees. Tagging after brothers. Happy. Barefoot on my pony. It was ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’-esque.”
“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.”
“I’m a flower gardener.”
“You need to live life to be able to have something to draw from.”
“I don’t have any regrets, because I think life is like a creek. It kind of meanders along, and you instinctively do the things you are meant to do. There’s no great plan except doing really good scripts, meeting great filmmakers. And I have to have something that I can bring to the role.”
“I loved growing up in a little town. I loved knowing people. I loved going to the store and running into people. I loved going into the store and having forgotten my bag, saying, ‘Charge it, put it on my bill.’ I loved going to the gas station and saying, ‘Pete, fill it up.’ I loved that continuity of life.”
“Most things in my life I had before leaving home. Values, support, great family. I was shaped at an early age. A musician playing guitar, I wanted to be a folk singer.”
“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.”
“You know, I don’t know what the future will bring, but I’m ready for whatever comes!”
“Nature is my church. The wind in the trees and the bugs and the frogs. All those things are comfort to me.”
“I had a dozen years to act before starting a family, then found that motherhood dwarfed everything else. Once or twice a year, I take a project that appeals to me for its redeeming social value.”
“My cousin, Rip Torn, persuaded me not to change my name. You shouldn’t change what you are in the search for success.”
“The name Sissy came because my brothers called me that.”
“I had no fear ’cause it seemed everyone in the audience always applauded whatever I did. Course, maybe it was because I always seemed to know everyone in the audience.”
“Our perception of celebrities in Hollywood is not the reality. The reality of our lives is so much like everyone else’s life. We have family members we love, everyone gets up in the morning, they have three meals a day and they go about their business.”
“I connect with just plain old everyday people. Human behavior fascinates me, the people who are the nuts and bolts of this country who help hold up the world.”
“There’s nothing like not washing your teeth or washing your face or brushing your teeth in the morning.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 am a woman of simple tastes.”
“I didn’t worry about leaving the fast lane – I was just so consumed with my baby that it seemed like the right thing to do. I never felt like I left New York, though. If you’ve lived in a place and loved it, you never feel like you left it.”
“You don’t forget the movies, but you forget the details of them.”
“When I started out in independent films in the early ’70s, we did everything for the love of art. It wasn’t about money and stardom. That was what we were reacting against. You’d die before you’d be bought.”
“I wanted to put all my family stories down for my girls, and I remember everything so vividly. I just wanted to put everything down while I still can remember it all.”
“If I hadn’t left Texas, I might not have met the director Terrence Malick, and I wouldn’t have met my husband and I wouldn’t have had the children that I’ve had. Life is interesting like that.”
“My parents were devoted. Civic minded. We had family counsels. Three of us children against two of them. We lived a ‘Leave It to Beaver’ time.”
“I’ve always been a people-watcher, and as an actor, later, I just mined all those little details.”
“Texas is just so rich with characters. Women who live alone in a little house on a thousand acres with nothing but cattle and a pickup truck. And an airplane.”
“Jingle taps on the majorette boots were an important part of a little girl growing up in the South.”
“Fame sweeps you away. I had to go home every six months to remember who I am.”
“I’ve not had a mean life.”
“I’m a fool for a good role in a creative piece where there are really such talented writers and wonderful actors.”
“It’s a whole other way of working when you work in films: You know exactly the arc of your character.”
“There have been several television movies, ‘Carrie 2,’ two musicals! I remember thinking, the first time there was a musical on Broadway, ‘Oh my gosh! The people who ordinarily go to the theaters, that’s not really the audience.’”
“I think that no human gets away unscathed in this old life. We’ve all experienced loss and grief and pain and tragedy.”
“I love the women I’ve played.”
“I’m drawn to ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, which is a big part of the human condition.”
“The important thing is to be part of a good project with good, talented people.”
“For me, I never really wanted to be in a ‘Sissy Spacek’ vehicle. That was not my intention. I got to be the ‘Everygirl.’”
“I go where the good work is being done.”
“Just about every town in Texas has a beauty pageant. Ours was called The Dogwood Fiesta. I was in one of those. I played the guitar and sang – and lost.”
“I think my mother’s family came on the Mayflower from England – D.A.R., you know.”
“My father’s family is German and Czech.”
“I like horseback riding. I like to hike. I play guitar and sing.”
“I’m not very big. But I’ve got a big bark and a lot of heart.”
“For a while, I just sang at a steakhouse. I would go from table to table and really just survived on tips.”
“Music is my thing. In fact, that’s what I wanted to do. I thought of myself as a musician. I had never thought about acting.”
“I actually never got in a play in school. My teacher said I never learned my lines.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 wanted to be Joni Mitchell.”
“When I first met David Lynch, he was living in the stables of the American Film Institute… He’d work all night and have his crew lock him in during the day, and he’d sleep.”
“I’m not Meryl Streep. My God – she’s the greatest actor that ever lived. It’s sad that ordinary actors like me are compared to her.”
“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.”
“My biggest thrill in life is to read in the afternoon until I fall asleep and take a nap.”
“I think giving up people is a difficult thing.”
“I just make films that attract me.”
“I like to do films that I would want to go see, basically. I’m not out to make a fast buck.”
“With my coloring, I’m nothing in black and white. I’ve seen my films sometimes on black-and-white TV. Disaster.”
“Our life is our life. If we waste it, we’re fools.”
“Hollywood’s fickle. It’s always been that way, and it will always be that way. And it’s always going to be somebody new and exciting comes along. That’s just the way it works, and it will always work that way. And I think that if you give it everything to the exclusion of your own real life and family, you’ve sold yourself down the river.”
“I live a very wonderful life centered in my home and community. We’re real involved with the school.”
“I got an automatic breadmaker. It’s the greatest! I get more points for that. You computerize in the results you want, and it’s no fail. I’m a modern homemaker.”
“Celebrity status for me came slowly. I wasn’t an overnight sensation. I had time to prepare emotionally.”
“I hated country music growing up, but it gets in your bone marrow, kind of like a disease.”
“I swore to my parents that no one would ever be able to buy me.”
“I follow the roles.”
“I think that we all fantasize about that teeny tiny time in the film industry when women ruled, back in the ’40s.”
“There are fewer roles, and I’ve done so many things already that I don’t want to repeat, so to find something you haven’t done is harder. I don’t want to play a country singer again.”
“There’s kind of a time you get warned about where the rug gets pulled out from under you: beyond ingenue, before you get into character stuff.”
“I’ve done some of my best work in films that fell right through the cracks, so I try to not make career moves but to build a body of work.”
“You get angry and frustrated wondering, ‘Are there enough parts for women?’”
“I’ve been into exercise my whole life, been a runner and been into health and fitness always.”
“I think the thread running through most midwives is the passion.”
“I’m not paralyzed with fear, but I realize it is important to live as if there’s no tomorrow, always trying to maintain your integrity and have no regrets.”
“The business has been good to me.”
“If you live only a movie-star life, you know only movie-star things. I needed to live a regular life with normal people around.”
“What’s normal? I think I’m normal… Maybe I’m abnormal because I get such a thrill from real life, just real life, everyday things.”
“If somebody wants to think of me as a movie star, that’s fine, that’s great. It sort of makes me giggle.”
“Junior and senior high school years were not a good time.”
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