Julianne Moore Quotes

Loving someone is giving them the power to break your heart, but trusting them not to.

Air pollution is terrible for our children. Every single scientist, every single doctor will tell you the same thing: Air pollution damages our children’s brains, their hearts, and their lungs.

I think imperfections are important, just as mistakes are important. You only get to be good by making mistakes, and you only get to be real by being imperfect.

I was a bookworm, and very skinny with big, thick glasses. I never went on dates and guys were afraid of me because I was smart. So I got contact lenses, started to dress a little better and tried not to talk about Plato with boys. It worked!

Art is an expression of who we are, what we believe, and what we dream about.

We impose order and narrative on everything in order to understand it. Otherwise, there's nothing but chaos.

The audience doesn't come to see you, they come to see themselves.

If you're 50, you're never going to be 50 ever again, so enjoy being 50. If you sit through the year wishing you were younger, before you know it, it's going to be over, and you're going to be 51.

We have to work for a living, but it is your life, so make sure you find something that you enjoy doing and people that you enjoy doing it with. Then, hopefully, you'll have a happy life.

I think that one of the things that you do learn is that falling in love and being in love with someone is a rarity. That you don't fall in love as many times as you think you're going to. And then when you do, it's really special; it's really important.

Everybody has the right to marry the person they love and be represented as a couple and family... It's something that people will look back on in years to come and say, 'I can't believe it took so long for us to recognize this.' It'll be like segregation and giving women the right to vote.

I've heard it said that winning an Oscar means you live five years longer. If that's true I want to thank the academy because my husband is younger than me.

The thing about 50 is that you've clearly reached a point where you have more of your life behind you than ahead of you, and that's a very different place to be in. You're thinking, 'I've done most of it.' I don't like that feeling. But it makes you evaluate your life and go, 'Am I doing what I want to do? Am I spending my time the way I want?'

People think that the directors direct actors. No. Really, what the director's doing is directing the audience's eye through the film.

I'm not supposed to communicate something that's completely unrealistic.

It's pretty boring, working by yourself. The scene happens in between the two of you, and then you don't know what it's going to be because it's a kind of combustion. So, you do take something from every actor you work with.

What gives you pleasure and joy? Let those be the things that lead you forward in life.

I always say about acting: the audience doesn't come to see you, they come to see themselves. So if you're able to give them an experience where they feel, 'Oh, my gosh, that's me, that's my story, they know!' then you've done your job.

I love my kids with all my heart and the last thing I want to worry about is the air they breathe.

I was the kid who read a lot and who was academic, and who was more of an indoor person than an outdoor person. I would win the summer reading contest at the library.

I like the excitement you get at touching another human being when you're acting with them and then having a little spark and not knowing what is going to happen in between you.

Life is full of compromises, and whether or not you're willing to negotiate.

You have to remember that Hollywood is in the business of making movies that they can sell tickets to, they're not in the business of finding great roles for actors.

Comedy is ridiculously hard. And if the rhythm is not right, if the music or the line is not right, it's not funny.

I don't consider myself very brave in any sense. I'm interested in this kind of behavior. My job is to try to make it realistic and emotionally resonant. That's the most challenging thing, to bring emotional resonance to what you do as an actor.

With actors, all our ages are out there for all to see - you can't hide anything, really. And it's kind of a relief. This is my age, this is what I look like without makeup on - who cares? That youth culture - that lying about your age - it's all denial of death anyway.

I still battle with my deeply boring diet of, essentially, yogurt and breakfast cereal and granola bars. I hate dieting. I hate having to do it to be the 'right' size. I'm hungry all the time. I think I'm a slender person, but the industry apparently doesn't. All actresses are hungry all the time, I think.

You always absorb a lot from a great actor. What you want, as an actor, no matter where you are in your career, is a partner who's going to bring everything they have to the scene.

You never have sex the way people do in the movies. You don't do it on the floor, you don't do it standing up, you don't always have all your clothes off, you don't happen to have on all the sexy lingerie. You know, if anybody ever ripped my clothes, I'd kill them.

My life may be a pretty crazy life at times, but its a very privileged one - being able to earn a good living doing what you love. Not many people have such an opportunity.

I hope this brings someone else the courage they need to face whatever challenge is before them.

I would be lying, if I said that sometimes it is just a job that you show up for because you're getting paid, and that's important, too. But, if you can be in a state of mind where you enjoy your job, whether it's just a job, or it's actually cathartic for you, or it's something personal. I think it would be much easier to be content with doing a good job.

At one point, 'feminist' became a pejorative term. How did that happen? If you're a feminist, you're basically saying you're a humanist.

In grade school I was a complete geek. You know, there's always the kid who's too short, the one who wears glasses, the kid who's not athletic. Well, I was all three.

You're in a movie, so you have to think about how something plays. It's not like you're thinking about how an audience is going to react. You're trying to present the story. You're trying to illuminate the lives of these people in the story. So I'm thinking about how my behavior as this character best illuminates what's going on with them in this moment in time. I always say it's sort of the director's job. People think that the directors direct actors. No. Really, what the director's doing is directing the audience's eye through the film.

Men aren't asked about age. Men aren't asked about their children. Not that these things aren't important, but I do feel like it becomes reductive when a woman's life becomes, 'Talk to me about your kids and how you feel about plastic surgery.'

Very rarely have I worked with a director where we've been at odds. And by the time you've actually talked to somebody and you have the job, there's something that they see in you that they want you to bring to the character. And the best director says very little to you, acting-wise. They usually just say, "Okay, here's the shot." It's their job to do all that stuff, and your job's to do the acting. So it's very rare that somebody will say, "Oh, no. I conceived this very differently".

You know, comedy's hard. With drama, you have a responsibility to the emotional truth, but with comedy, you have emotional truth and you have technique on top of it.

I was lucky enough to come in at the beginning of the independent film movement, and it's really shaped my life and my career.

There was a period of time in America where the advertising world actually went to the housewives of America and had them write jingles that would appeal to them. It was actually brilliant marketing.

Either you like a person or you don't like a person. I don't have to love somebody to work with them. I'm a professional person. But when you get the bonus of really liking someone and really connecting with them and really enjoying them, it's a fantastic thing.

I don't really care if people like a character ornot; I think in life we don't always like everybody. But you haveto be able to understand them.

I'm older than I was before when I was young.

When you become a parent, you finally appreciate and understand what your mother did.

When I was younger, I thought I had to shut myself off, work really hard to cry. I learned after a while that that's just not... You know, often in life, you cry when you're caught off-guard. That's where I need to be when I'm acting, too.

I do Ashtanga yoga three times a week, and I run a couple of times a week, too. I really like yoga; I enjoy the actual doing of it, so it doesn't feel like the agony of the gym felt like to me.

Nobody does a lot of plotting. They can't. Everybody wants to do that in life, but I think it's almost impossible. Opportunities present themselves, and you say, "Hey, is this interesting to me?" Is this something you might want to pursue? Maybe you'll get it, maybe you won't. It really does have to do with a "one foot in front of the other" kind of thing, I think.

If you are at odds with the director, neither one of you is going to get anywhere. You really do have to be able to make both of you happy.

I read a lot, I always read. I like to be inside a story. When I started acting, even in high school, it sort of felt like that's as close as you can get to being inside a book, and I feel that way even with movies more so, because you've kind of created this imaginary world, and everybody is colluding to create it.

People talk about generating my own work, but I don't really know how to go about that. There are certainly some roles in the theater I'd like to play but I don't know if I'll ever get to do it.