Characters never live with me in film the way they do on stage, and they have certain ramifications that movies just never have.

In my real life, I see people who are really enjoying their lives - I mean, really enjoying their lives - and they take joy in their daily obligations; they just do. And I believe that at a certain point, you've got to choose to be that way. You choose to approach your life that way. Or it's all kind of a drag until Friday.

It's a fantastic mirror to us to engage with art, to engage with paintings that are about tragedy, to go see Shakespearean comedies, to read a Greek play... We have always investigated the lightness and darkness of the human soul, in all these forms. So why not do it on television?

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.'

As an actor, I always like some tension, some distance, between me and the character I'm playing.

I like the South: Southern literature and that relationship between grotesqueness and living below the Mason-Dixon line. But I also understand that people view it as a limitation - as an actor and as a person - perceptions that are really wrong: that you are ignorant and possibly illiterate, or that it's cute.

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

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

I've worked with a lot of female directors over the course of my career: Martha Coolidge, Catherine Hardwicke, Jodie Foster.

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. But this has worked for me: Never memorizing a scene.

Minibars are very appealing, especially when someone else is paying.

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.

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

In the life of a director - these days in particular - when it really does take so long to do a movie, with a few exceptions, actors may never work with a director again, even if they're great friends.

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

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

I have never been an easy fit. I'm a leading lady character actor; I don't fit in one slot simply.

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

I got the Mr. Incredible mold - the 3D, you know - it's cool.

Even very ordinary people, upon closer examination, can often look extraordinary.

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.

I can very much enjoy taking a year off. Whereas some people would feel crippled by that, I can feel enlarged by it.

Drama is all about the moment of ultimate conflict for a person.

The first and most important thing you need to be creative is to relax, particularly for the actors.

When you have an actor on set who is playing themselves in a movie that is about the most cathartic, most traumatizing event of their lives, you don't even have to mention that.

Giving up something personal to the public, you are surrendering something.

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

Do I trust myself? Sometimes I don't even know, but I can only just kind of throw my hat in the ring and hope for the best. Depending on how much I trust the other people is how much freedom I can allow myself to have on that particular set.

Sometimes I go, 'Wow, this is a director I really, really want to work with,' like David Cronenberg. I haunted David Cronenberg for years before, and then he offered me a role.

I'm almost 60. I've been doing this for a while. In order to do this for that long, you have to make decisions based on lots and lots of different criteria, you know. I mean, the criteria has to shift, especially if you're an actress.

Actors do movies because you want to make a connection; you want an audience to recognise themselves in what it is that you're depicting.

In my career, I've never been a box office name. Granted, a couple of my movies have made a lot of money, but I'd do other movies which make very little money, or they're not seen that much.

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

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

I would say, yeah, I'm a spiritual person.

Do I believe in God? I don't know what that really means. I don't know what my personal connections with G-o-d are. But spirituality is soulfulness.

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.

I was playing 'The Flight of the Bumblebee,' and I totally forgot the ending, so I performed the whole piece again, and I still couldn't remember it.

Sometimes it's the script or an opportunity to work with an incredible director.

Sometimes it's the lead, but there are not always leads out there, so then it's an interesting supporting character, or there's a lot of dough, although that happens less and less. Let's have a good laugh about that one.

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

I'm not a great Maureen Dowd fan, because I really find her poisonous, on the record.

It's not like television is now for women who have been put out to pasture. Television is for everybody.

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

There are, in terms of numbers, more leading roles for women in television than there are features. That's absolutely certain.

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.

Pixar has the integrity to not rush.

I started doing repertory theatre in upstate New York when I was 15, went back when I was 16, and by that time decided that I really wanted to study drama seriously and go to an acting conservatory called Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

I wouldn't even go spend the night at a friend's unless they had a piano. But I didn't have the chops, the extraordinary talent, to be able to play the piano professionally.