Top 100 Holly Hunter Quotes

There was a drama club in our high school, and I just did plays.

Mothers and daughters can stay very connected during teenage years. In the middle of your life, you can become very alone. Even though you’re connected deeply to other family members, lovers, husbands, friends.

I remember that when I was in my 30s, a hot age for an actress, lots of offers were coming in, but nothing was great, and I didn’t work for 18 months. It was at a really fruitful age, and I wanted to work. There was nothing coming down the pipeline that I thought was good – and then I got ‘The Piano.’

Pixar has the integrity to not rush.

Privacy is paradise.

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.

I am often offered roles or women who are very strong, uncompromising. But it’s fun to do ‘Manglehorn,’ where I’m playing somebody who’s very open, very optimistic, very positive. I don’t want to bore myself.

I think that the audience feels a real connection with Zoe Kazan because she’s so instantly lovable.

A play is a hard thing, particularly in L.A. It’s less expensive than in New York, but there’s also less of a commitment to people doing plays than in New York. So it’s a strange battle.

I moved to the city in August of 1980, and someone I thought was a friend had an apartment in this wedding cake of a building, so I slept on her couch for a few days.

I object to the actual phrase ‘Follow me.’ You’ve gotta be kidding! Why would I want to follow anybody else? Nor do I want them to follow me. The machinations of my life, the banalities – they’re mine. They belong to me.

I don’t suffer the decisions the studio world makes.

Each project, I can almost feel like I’m like a different person.

Crazy people are my people? Really? I think that’s silly. That’s another one of those pigeonhole things. Lay somebody on an ironing board and put a scalding hot iron on them, get that going real good: ‘Oh, this is who Holly Hunter is.’

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.

You can tell young actors it’s going to be very difficult, but there’s no way you can understand the difficulties and the rewards through description. You have to cellularly experience it. It’s a very difficult career in the long run, but at the same time, there’s no long-haul career I’d rather be involved with.

I’m a leading lady character actor; I don’t fit in one slot simply. I’ve always been used to a certain amount of struggle, and that prepared me wonderfully for a mature age.

I heckled somebody at the U.S. Open once. And you know, tennis, it’s not a good place for that.

People don’t come to New York out of resignation. They come here with a dream. Mine was to be an actress.

This is one of the reasons I like to act – it’s because acting forces you into situations you don’t know.

I like to do research. It gives me a sense of ownership. That’s very powerful for me as an actor to just own it.

There’s a tremendous amount of humor… in very unexpected places.

I don’t offer advice to actors only because I’ve seen actors become successful through ways that would never even occur to me or that wouldn’t work for me.

My life has a great degree of dimension without making movies.

This is why we have racism, really: because people are confronting the unknown, and they don’t like that.

I believe that there is good. I believe there is evil. Do I believe that they come from God who is watching us conduct myriad never-ending wars and looks benignly on because there’s higher purpose to all of this? I don’t think so.

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.

I love wearing wigs because they’re instantly transformational.

There’s no way that anyone can know the ebb and flow of one’s career. You can’t know that. You can tell young actors it’s going to be very difficult, but there’s no way you can understand the difficulties and the rewards through description. You have to cellularly experience it.

Is there a higher energy? I would say yes, even if the energy is collective. Even if it’s kind of Jungian, or the whole thing is collective consciousness, that may be God as far as I’m concerned. So is there an energy that’s higher than mine? Yes.

‘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.

What people have thought of me, of the turns that I’ve taken, has never really played into my decisions.

I’m not a classically beautiful person, but hopefully it increases my longevity as an actress that my career isn’t dependent on my great, great good looks.

What’s great about cable is that the ceiling of expectation is lowered because fewer people have to tune in for it to be a success. You don’t need 23 million people a week like you do in broadcast.

Is there a higher energy? I would say yes, even if the energy is collective. Even if it’s kind of Jungian, or the whole thing is collective consciousness, that may be God as far as I’m concerned. So is there an energy that’s higher than mine? Yes. But would I claim it as God? I would say no.

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 it.

I liked to carry the script into an audition because, for me, it reminded people that this was not the final performance. I’m still a work in progress.

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.

I don’t believe in angels, and I’m not a religious person.

I am a huge fan of Cronenberg, all his movies.

The unknown makes people uncomfortable. And even living in a city that’s as cosmopolitan as New York City is, there’s so many things I don’t know about other cultures, even though I encounter other cultures – maybe even 18 or 19 of them – when I get on a subway car every day.

New Yorkers have an intimacy with Trump, man. I mean, for decades.

I had such total, unequivocal, enthusiastic encouragement to be an actress. Looking back, I really find that to be a total mystery. Don’t ask me why. My father was just in love with the idea that I would be an actress.

There are ways that women absorb situations, and I think women are different kinds of listeners. They’re different in terms of how they parse out problem solving.

After I did ‘Broadcast News’ and got an Academy Award nomination, the first thing I did was ‘Roe vs. Wade’ at NBC.

I bring all of myself to my roles. You only see me. You don’t see anything else but me. That is who’s there. They’re manifestations of my own self.

I’m too small and too short. I thought that was odd; that should be a non-issue to me.

The unknown makes people uncomfortable.

I moved to New York in 1980, and I met Beth Henley, who’s a marvellous playwright and who I have a real personal and professional association with, in 1982. I met her in a stalled elevator – we were the only two people in there – and she’s been one of my very dearest friends since.

I get cold really quickly, but I don’t care. I like weather. I never understand why people move someplace so that they can avoid weather.

Once I hit 45, there was a real downturn. But I got an incredibly provocative, delicious lead role in a television series called ‘Saving Grace,’ and I loved the character.

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 features.

I don’t think it’s wrong to make fun of some of the stuff that we think and we do.

So much progress has been made with topics like mental illness and drug abuse and sexual identity.

I heckled somebody at the U.S. Open once.

I think it’s really odd, too, that the public is so privy to how much money the actors make and what movies cost. It seems to me to be beside the point. When I go to a movie I really don’t want to think about the money. I want to see the story.

I got a horror film, ‘The Burning,’ and suddenly I was making crazy money, like a thousand a week, so I moved into an apartment on Amsterdam with a guy who was also in ‘The Burning,’ Jason Alexander.

I don’t make decisions just on the character I’m supposed to play. Sometimes it’s based on the director, sometimes it’s based on the story, sometimes I need money, or sometimes I’m just starved to work.

Being somebody who’s like a theater geek that I am, I can just go right back to Aeschylus and Euripides and Sophocles: they were writing about gods and goddesses versus humans, and how gods could distort, pervert, or help people get what they want.