Laura Linney Quotes

Tanning is tricky, because a lot of people just look orange.

It is always good to explore the stuff you don't agree with, to try and understand a different lifestyle or foreign worldview. I like to be challenged in that way, and always end up learning something I didn't know.

Traits like humility, courage, and empathy are easily overlooked - but it's immensely important to find them in your closest relationships.

I have a bag with a toothbrush and toothpaste and all the things I might need during the day. I call the bag my trailer. Sometimes you don't have a trailer, so that's my trailer.

I believe that no matter what you do in life, if you learn the basics through theater, it will help you in everything else - problem solving, communication, discipline, all of that stuff.

It's always nice when you do something and it's well received as opposed to the other way which God knows happens to everybody. When the good times come around, you take a deep breath, appreciate it, but not take it too seriously.

Doing the right thing has power.

People's view of cancer will change when they have their own relationship with cancer, which everyone will, at some point.

That's my favorite food group: donut. I love the donut.

Comedy is a way to make sense of chaos. It's a way of dealing with things that are overwhelming, that threaten you; it's a way to survive and get closer to the truth.

I think everybody handles things very differently and you can conjecture, but until you're put in that situation, you really don't know.

I am very aware that playwrights, particularly good ones, have a intention for everything they write. Language and punctuation is used specifically, and most of the time actors can find wonderful clues about character in the rhythm and cadence of the language used.

My family is from the South, and I can remember all those ladies I grew up with, like my great-aunts, who had handkerchiefs. There's something sweet about them.

Most scripts are written to be green lit. They're not written to be acted. And a lot of writers with the greatest intention in the world don't write for actors. They don't understand the architecture of what an actor needs to get from point A to point B.

My parents were divorced and I didn't grow up with my father, but I spent a lot of time around him, and his influence on me has been profound.

I grew up in Manhattan and, since my father was a playwright, all I ever wanted to be was a stage actress.

A magnetic personality doesn't necessarily indicate a good heart.

My parents were divorced and I would spend weekends with my father.

When your life is being threatened there's an instinctive urge to fight. You fight for the time you have, for your relationships.

I enjoy learning about different periods and people, and then taking what's universal about the human condition and seeing where it matches up. No matter where you are, certain things unite everybody.

When you tell people, your world changes, your identity changes and people treat you differently. And then, not only do you have to deal with your own emotional response to what's going on, but you take on everybody else's emotional response.

Cancer is so much bigger than a TV show.

My castings sort of go in phases. There'll be several icy professional parts - a lawyer or a cop. And then there'll be the intelligent-but-wounded group and then the period things. It goes in sequence.

It was so soon after I'd had my son and I really wasn't planning on going back to work for a while. I will walk over hot coals to work with Bill Condon on anything, the experience that you have with him is just too good... I've certainly never worked with him before so the trio of Bill [Codon], Ian [McKellen], and Sherlock Holmes, and England: it was too much to say "no" to.

I crave a cone of silence every once in while.

The entertainment industry is terrified of silence.

I'm very hard on my bags because I tend to carry a lot of stuff with me.

I don't want to spend my life in my 40s feeling bad about being in my 40s, and then all of a sudden I'm 50, and I will have missed a whole decade!

Where I did feel a difference is learning to just work in a different way so that your resources are not completely depleted so that you don't have anything to give to your child when you go home, and fortunately I've been working long enough that I know how to make that shift so that I don't compromise my work or compromise my relationships; not compromising parenting is really the biggest difference.

I grew up in Manhattan on the Upper East Side.

Our culture is set up on a feud mentality, or a "Housewives" mentality, that women just fight. And it's such a shallow way to exist as far as our evolution is concerned, and our culture is concerned. It's fun to watch women fight, in a storytelling way, but in the world, women shouldn't be seen as a threat to other women.

Some people's personalities are so compelling that they command attention.

Courtroom dramas can be boring.

There's a real passing down in the theater, almost ad nauseam. You have to listen to older people talk about their experience, but it makes you very aware of what has come before you or what is coming after you - that you're a part of a link in a chain. It's not all about you.

Collaboration. ... For me, it has informed every move I've ever made. And it saved me in many ways and still does. When things get hard, you can cling to the work.

Theater is the foundation of how I live my life, actually. My father was a playwright, so I was around it all the time and loved to talk shop with him, just loved it. And basically everything that I hold to be good and true and worthy, I learned in the theater. So not even just about the work, but just about life. Discipline, problem solving, creativity, how to get along with people.

I love actors, regardless of where they are in their skill level. There's something terribly satisfying about working with someone who's really learning.

I think everyone's journey through this crazy, weird, wild, wonderful area of work named acting is really their own. And if you're going for something that isn't yours, you're wasting time. You could be focused on your own work instead of thinking about somebody else.

I'm always curious, but I'm learning things I never thought I'd learn. I get to travel to places I never thought I'd go.

I love to work in all sorts of different situations. I think you learn a lot, which is why I try not to approach something the same way, because it might not be appropriate, and then you can get lazy just out of boredom. So I love any approach.

What I love about a play is that it's such an investment because only time can create a lot of what happens onstage.

I get cold - really cold - when I travel.

Ask "why" until there is no more "why."

I tend to make low-budget movies but, yeah, I make more money than I ever thought I would make.

Some big movies are terrific, and some aren't. They're made for different reasons, and they have different impacts and they're very different experiences making them. But if they're good, if you're with good people, then hooray.

What I hope in my ideal world is that with each project, I'll either get to work with a really great script that would force me to grow, or work with a really great actor who will make me better.

What I find so interesting about people is the choices they make, and how that effects their behavior, their sense of self and their relationships.

I never felt like a happy-go-lucky ingenue to begin with. And parts are written better when you're older. When you're young, you're written to be an ingenue, and you're written to be a quality. You're actually not written to be a person, you're written for your youth to inspire someone else, usually a man. So I find it just much more liberating.

I could have gone to the gym for three hours a day and bought into all that, but I just wasn't interested.

Fame didn't happen to me in my 20s, it has been a gradual thing which probably makes it easier to deal with.