Sissy Spacek

For me, life is a bowl of cherries.

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 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 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.

My biggest thrill in life is to read in the afternoon until I fall asleep and take a nap.

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 think giving up people is a difficult thing.

I follow the roles.

Junior and senior high school years were not a good time.

If somebody wants to think of me as a movie star, that's fine, that's great. It sort of makes me giggle.

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.

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 you live only a movie-star life, you know only movie-star things. I needed to live a regular life with normal people around.

The business has been good to me.

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.

I think the thread running through most midwives is the passion.

I've been into exercise my whole life, been a runner and been into health and fitness always.

You get angry and frustrated wondering, 'Are there enough parts for women?'

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.

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.

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.

I think that we all fantasize about that teeny tiny time in the film industry when women ruled, back in the '40s.

You need to live life to be able to have something to draw from.

Our life is our life. If we waste it, we're fools.

With my coloring, I'm nothing in black and white. I've seen my films sometimes on black-and-white TV. Disaster.

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.