Debra Winger Quotes

Most bad behavior comes from insecurity.

It's such an amazing thing to be loved for who you are.

When you connect with a cause, it's like falling in love.

Denying the lines on our faces makes a comment about age and wisdom I don't care to make.

When I was younger I probably didn't understand something basic about tact, but I think it kept faint-hearted people at arm's distance and that's not such a bad thing, because life is short and I know the kind of people I want to work with.

I want to start a trend of women as we really look. Some good things, some not so good. I am tired of looking at frozen faces.

Theater is all about the rehearsal process. In fact, I think a lot of times opening night there's a mixed sadness because you're finished with a lot of people's favorite part of the process, which is finding the character and discovering it, and then you get to live it.

In the early part of my life I carried the flame for fiery women: perky women who were not dumb.

I was never afraid of failure after that because, I think, coming that close to death you get kissed. With the years, the actual experience of course fades, but the flavor of it doesn't. I just had a real sense of what choice do I have but to live fully?

It's no secret that I didn't love 'An Officer And A Gentleman' then, and I certainly don't love it now, so at least no one could accuse me of being inconsistent.

I don't think it is worth trying to look 10 years younger through surgery.

I have a thing with the camera. The lens is unconditional. It doesn't judge you.

I started out in stand-up when I was 18, which is really masochistic, and I did it really till I started going in movies. I did it for about three years out in LA.

I think when it comes to Botox and surgery, actresses should do it or not do it, but be honest about their choices.

I make decisions for my life, not the other way around. Besides, when you have a kid, you must weigh everything against time with your child.

The older you get, the more you've done.

A good marriage is different to a happy marriage.

I had a very insightful friend who warned me back when I stopped reading scripts, 'It's easier to change directions while you're still moving.' If you stop, it's harder to get started again. I still don't think I made the wrong decision, but he was right.

I do not need a lot of money to be happy.

I don't believe in careers. I believe in work. I'm not interested in some 'big picture that would be really good for me'.

If I could have one prayer answered, I would pray for patience. I move so fast sometimes. I try to slow down.

The minute we have a pain, we want a diagnosis. So I think the minute we feel love, it's very hard to just let it be. We want to identify it, we want to catalog it, we want to keep the thing and create the environment it happened in. That's where marriage comes from! Let's make an institution out of it!

I guess what I have to say is, "Don't do it." I don't recommend it, because, having said that, the people that should do it will do it anyway, despite the fact that I've said not to do it. Only the ones who've said, "Oh, she said not to do it," aren't going to do it, and they shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

There's a small club of women who are willing to age.

I happen to be interested in watching a face age. I like faces of women aging so it makes me personally quite sad. That's a beautiful gift from God. If people don't want to see that anymore then I won't be in anymore movies.

Never say never, but the thought of electively cutting oneself is beyond my grasp, and I also object to it politically. Denying the lines on our faces makes a comment about age and wisdom I don't care to make.

But I never worried about having a child in my 40s, which is unusual - normally, I'm the queen of worry.

Bad acting is the ultimate inconsideration.

Granted there are only seven stories in the universe. And I agree with that. But give me a great variation of those stories. And literate.

Actors always want you to believe something else even though that's the truth and to do that well it's almost a dying art.

"Stand up against the wall!" That's what everybody gets offered, especially women. When women started appearing on TV again in something other than the girl or the mother role it was all, "Get up against the wall," or, "The skin underneath her fingernail would tell me that she," you know, forensic stuff. Oh, God gross. Now, they're hunting terrorists.

I've been acting all along. I understand that I haven't been in people's viewers, but acting has never not been a part of my life, just more time in between and less high-profile.

People pay to see movies with women looking beautiful, but I think there will be a place for me to play women looking my own age.

I just want to sleep, and eat, and learn about what's going on in the world.

I used to love going on a junket and promoting a film when it was not a 24-hour news cycle, and when there weren't so many media outlets. You could actually talk about the film.

I became an actor because I couldn't not.

I am one of the happiest people I know. And that's a weird place to have arrived at from being a depressed Jewish kid.

I have enjoyed a wonderful run in films, so far, and I may, at some point, come back. But it will be in my own time and in my own style.

I hope to find the roles that are age appropriate but not yearning to be younger, or parenting ad nauseam.

I am lucky enough to be married to a guy who tells me I look beautiful every day.

Once a Altman's film has been in a town, it kind of wrecks the town. It doesn't even matter what the film is because, suddenly, everybody's hip and stores start doubling prices or whatever.

You've got the whole civil rights movements emanating from the south, you've got the music that came out of the south that is the core of our current music, so for me that thinking comes out of having Dukes of Hazzard thrown in your face: that the south is a bunch of twangy people that I can't understand. So this is, hopefully, part of the movement to restore the south to its proper and rightful place in our nation... which is huge and pervasive. It's not about Texas - I'm not saying Texas doesn't have it's own unique history - but the south has this at its core.

I think that we definitely deal with that issue and don't ignore it, the issue of drink, but that's not where it ends. I just think that what the fear is that you think alcoholic writer or whatever and you forget the intelligence that can be present. I mean so many people just write off someone who drinks as one thing.

I was the all-American face. You name it, honey - American Dairy Milk, Metropolitan Life insurance, McDonald's, Burger King. The Face That Didn't Matter - that's what I called my face.

It's inconceivable to some people that that wouldn't be the sexiest thing to do in the whole world: to be a movie star, and make money, and be pampered, and whatever.

I was shooting one day and it struck me that I was the age that Shirley MacLaine was when she played my mother. I had to sit down. I had to get a chair, okay? It was a weird moment.

It's not necessarily that having an affair you get something from the other person that you're not getting from your partner, it's that you created a situation for yourself in which you're unexpressed and so maybe you feel another person allows you to express yourself.

Writers often have a 'drunk' that is different than anyone else's. That's why it's so insidious and so damning. First of all, because they can write when they're drinking - or they think they can. A lot of writers will tell me - and this is the latest one I've heard - you drink while you're thinking about what to write, but when you actually write, you sober up.

I remember the old joke, while women are deciding which schools the kids go to, where you're going to live, how the money's going to be spent, and where your health care is coming from, the men are out standing around the barbecue solving all the big world problems. So I think this is a well known fact and we're not breaking any new ground here.

I think it's a great thing that women went out in droves to see Sex and the City movie. I think it's wonderful and I think women have always shown they're looking both to be entertained and challenged in a theatre. I don't think women are afraid of movies that make them think; make them feel sad. The movies that I've been associated with are not exactly Sex and the City but women are leading the way to the theatre on those. They used to call it a date movie where the girl gets to choose.