Quotes

My father said there were two kinds of people in the world: givers and takers. The takers may eat better, but the givers sleep better.

[on her debt to Lee Strasberg and Sandra Seacat, from her 2010 autobiography] I only wish Lee could have lived to see me portray a schizophrenic in Nobody's Child (1986). I never could have gotten near playing that kind of part without Lee's exercises, and the subsequent work I did and continue to do with his primary disciple, the brilliant Sandra Seacat.

[from her book "Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny" (2010)] I was learning that even a woman with power, the path was dotted with land mines -- she's so ambitious, she's so aggressive, she's ruthless. "Funny thing," I used to say, "a man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless... all a woman has to do is put you on hold.".

[on Free to be You and Me] I decided I would do a record for Dion, because my sister and I had grown up listening to story records, and I thought it'd be great, I'll do a record for her, and I asked my friends if they would tell me what they wished they'd been told as a child. And one male friend of mine said 'I wish I'd been told it was all right to cry'. So we wrote a song, Carol Hall wrote a song, 'It's All Right to Cry', we got Rosie Greer, this big great strapping black football player, to sing 'It's All Right to Cry'. And what I wish that I'd been told is that every girl didn't have to get married.

[on the inspiration for Free to be You and Me] There weren't any stories that said to young girls 'You can be anything you want to be, the world is open to you, the choices are all there'. All the things I thought I had learned as a young woman had not found their way into children's books. In fact one book I found said, it was a picture book, and on one side it would say 'Boys are doctors, girls are nurses, boys are pilots, girls are stewardesses'.