Laura Dern

All I can start with is what moves me and feels like a great challenge as an actor and I think is saying something unusual or irreverent or human - honest in some way.

I think there are ways to get so caught up in your career and being so heavy and dramatic, and everyone wants to be a tortured genius.

I don't want to mess with my face. So I'm becoming fluent in French so I can go to France and make French films when I'm 60.

For people who feel things in an enormous way, it's pretty hard to live in this world.

I was raised by two actors in a moment in time - the Seventies - when there was no judgment of characters, no heroes and bad guys.

Having egregious divorces - where you just hate each other - is really the easy way out.

Every role is a new form of surrender.

God bless nannies.

My daughter wants to do yoga with me and wants to be in the theater thing, and I can't tell her, 'Don't be an actress.' My son loves guitar and loves to be in a band and wants his iTunes downloaded with all this old-school hip-hop so he understands where hip-hop came from.

As an actor, you're not kind of thinking about your own work or watching the movie for the first time.

I've seen 3-D movies where it seems a little crude or too in-your-face.

Irvin Kershner, no matter what anyone says, has done some great work. 'Eyes of Laura Mars' is an incredible movie.

If you have a movie coming out, and people are talking about you, the amount of scripts will build.

What I consider a good part for a woman and what some other Hollywood people think are good women's parts are very different. I don't want to play the supportive girlfriend who has nine scenes and just loves that man, maybe cheats on him in one scene but will always be there, and I mean - give me a break.

You'll be offered the 'lead' in this new hot film with such-and-such A-list director, 'a fabulous part' - a fabulous part? A fabulous part is a character with a soul, who starts here and goes to there, you know? There aren't many of those.

Meditation is a practice that is considered mainstream: The NFL uses it, the NBA uses it, heart patients use it. It's very easy to consider yourself a meditator and not be too alternative-minded.

I always wanted to do a 'Ms. Smith Goes to Washington.'

I was raised in the '70s, and I've worked with people I love, and I've been on sets with my parents, with people who run a set and require of actors a sense of liberty and freedom and exploration and failure into brave achievement.

For me, the greatest good fortune I have being raised by actors is I came in knowing that a career is the ebb and flow.

Any journey of a creative person has, you know, really unusual challenges and years where you don't work and years where you work.

In American culture we are supposed to take a pill when we're depressed or in grief as opposed to actually feeling.

I've worked with David Lynch since I was 17, and working with him is home and family; being around Alexander Payne is home and family, Jonathan Demme. There are directors... Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson... They are directors where I create homes.

Something that I've cared about deeply my whole career is getting to work with filmmakers and inventors of stories that are hysterical because they are just so painfully true.

I got picked for very unique and independent filmmaking experiences with auteurs. And I'm so lucky.

I know that I've seen a mannerism, or a way I've cried, or something, where I see a flash of my parents.

I don't think you have to be in these serious, heavy, independent little movies to be an actor. Some of the most interesting acting I've seen is on cable television.

If you're looking to be loved for a part, it's great and enticing to be adorable in a romantic comedy. But then, as an actor, you get stuck.

Anybody you make a movie with when you're 12 and they're 14, you're going to know them your whole life.

Ben Stiller, who I love and who is a friend and is such an incredible actor - he's hilarious, obviously, but I thought his performance in 'Greenberg' was extraordinary.

Unfortunately, I was making comedies in my 20s, but other people didn't realize they were comedies.

I love Clint Eastwood, and I wish to work with him again. He's completely irreverent about everything, including his own beautiful work.

Sadly, half of marriages end in divorce. Half of my girl friends and male friends have been through one, and their kids are doing great. There's no shame around it - unless you want to project that on to yourself - but certainly there's no longer cultural shame. Everyone is walking through it.

I was raised on movie sets, and I decided for myself at a very young age that it was what I wanted to do.

My dad was always interested in characters he didn't understand - he was such a great bad guy in movies. And that is really the thing that calls me to the material often: something I struggle to understand in human behaviour.

Love means a lot to me, and I love loving, and I love boys.

I will be working with David Lynch when I'm 80.

To stay true to your art is such a complicated journey, and Dad clearly has done it.

There are artists or filmmakers or cinematographers who have had long careers who, maybe to reinvent themselves or just to stay in a secure place, layer it on or ham it up, if I can use that expression, or make grand choices that don't feel as authentic as what they did to make us fall in love with them in the first place.

When you become a parent, you really care that you get that right, and you care about nothing else.

I have a very wonderfully, bizarrely amazing relationship with my mother in that we've been through a myriad of emotions because we've acted together and played all these different kinds of mother-daughters.

I'm interested in human nature. That's why I chose to become an actor.

I think it's about not just the crisis you're in, but how do you get to the other side? How do we heal? How do we survive this experience while remaining hopeful instead of filled with despair? That's what interests me.

I was raised Catholic, and my grandmother taught me to stay. As a teenager, I thought if you went on a date, you should stay for a couple of years. I didn't realize that if he wasn't your cup of tea, you got to leave.

I'm moved by people who see the world differently than others. People who see the world with a longing for its poetry often can be broken people.

I like to play people who are deeply flawed, and I want to find the good nature in them. I even try to be kind to myself when I've made big mistakes.

It's lovely to be considered pretty and lovely to do photo shoots, and I just love fashion. But I'm proud that I did the characters I wanted to do.

I always wondered what it would be like to have a normal childhood.

Jealousy is a scary thing.

I grew up with a tribe of amazing women, but certainly my mother and my godmother really modeled women as actors.

I was on the cover of a lot of magazines, and there were compliments about beauty and fashion and what I was wearing. Man, if you get locked into that, you can lose your freedom as an actress.