American Actress Quotes

When you're busy blocking out difficult emotions and feelings, you're not going to feel the good stuff, either.

Valerie Bertinelli

Sometimes I would make myself very still and try to imagine myself dead. I tried to invoke the feeling of the very last breath I would take.

We do what we can. The results are none of our business.

The main problem in marriage is that, for a man, sex is a hunger—like eating. If a man is hungry and can't get to a fancy French restaurant, he'll go to a hot dog stand. For a woman, what's important is love and romance.

Hollywood men are a lot of phony balonies.

I want to reach people and express myself. You have to put up with the risk of being misunderstood if you are going to try to communicate. You have to put up with people projecting their own ideas, attitudes, misunderstanding you. But it's worth being a public fool if that's all you can be in order to communicate yourself.

This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It's for the women that stand beside me, Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox. And it's for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.

It seems strange that everyone I'm writing about was very famous.... Didn't I ever find anyone interesting who was not famous? Actually, no, I didn't.

There's something so muffled about the way you experience things. It's as if you were trying to slip through life unchanged.

Kathleen Turner

I think cooking completes you as a woman. … I woke up one morning and said, I can't do this [eating meat] to myself anymore. I didn't feel good. I was constipated all the time. … I used to live to eat. Now I eat to live.

I was caught in a private cycle of sadness and the only conceivable relief I could find was in the telling.

Direct your mind where you want it to travel instead of always going for the ride.

I have a head for business and a bod for sin. Is there anything wrong with that?

Melanie Griffith

I honestly don't understand the big fuss made over nudity and sex in films. It's silly. On TV, the children can watch people murdering each other, which is a very unnatural thing, but they can't watch two people in the very natural process of making love. Now, really, that doesn't make any sense, does it?

I'm sure the way to be happy is to live well beyond your means!

Getting the pretty back is about getting back in touch with your essential self: the part of you that knows what you really want.

I was really intimidated, but then the acting kicks in. We have a similar fire, so he doesn't intimidate me in that way; I can get really angry, I can get in your face too.

My grandmother taught me that accomplishments meant less than what you left behind. I started to ask myself what impact my comedy would have on people's lives. And that changed my act. I got cleaner. I stopped talking about generic stuff like airplane peanuts and started speaking the truth about my gift.

Sherri Shepherd

If we bring a little joy into your humdrum lives, it makes us feel our work ain't been in vain for nothin'.

I am not an African American. I'm not from Africa. I'm from New York. My roots run a whole lot deeper than most of the people who don't have anything in front of the word American. I can trace my family tree back to the Mayflower. We may not have been on it, but we were under it, and that counts too.

Whoopi Goldberg

I see people giving me looks because I'm so opinionated. That hurts my feelings, but at the end of the day I have to live with me and respect myself. And I've done enough things in my life where I was confused and didn't respect myself that I will not do it any more.

We as human beings do this thing where we stuff down our feelings until they find a way to manifest themselves. We try to avoid them until there's no more room and they come bubbling up like a pot of boiling-hot water that overflows. And when it does, it burns.

Genius is the talent for seeing things straight. It is seeing things in a straight line without any bend or break or aberration of sight, seeing them as they are, without any warping of vision. Flawless mental sight! That is genius!

I'll go to my grave remembering the tears and laughs I didn't get.

Look, I'm not thrilled that perfect strangers get to have an opinion about me or feel like they know me, but I have enough perspective to know they don't know me, and I do have a life and I don't live it for other people.… My reality is very different from what everyone read. The problem is because I did get myself in a lot of trouble, I didn't get to do the kind of work that maybe I should have been doing, so it became confusing who I really am and what I am really about … It's totally fucking strange to me that people took a lot of that fucking stuff seriously. … It's not their fault that they don't know me personally. Who's got the time?