Quotes

Performers should be judged only by their work on-stage -- too much is made of their personal lives.

[2002 interview, regarding her abandonment of Broadway stardom] "Who wants to be up on the stage all the time? It isn't easy. You have to be awfully invested in the fame aspect, and I really never was. What I cared about was the discipline of acting, whether I did well or not.

I'm much more interested in what's behind acting, which is the inquiry into the human condition. Everyone gets acting mixed up with the desire to be famous, but some of us really just stumbled into the fame part, while we were really just interested in the process of acting.

[on living in Scottsdale, AZ, in 2002] I'm teaching acting classes. I had been based in New York, and maybe I should have stayed. I mean, I like it here, but it's very conservative, isn't it? I was talking to this man the other night, and he was ranting about people who come here from the East and wreck the state by voting Democrat. Hey, how would you vote on Prop 202 [an Indian gaming referendum] The commercials are hysterical! All that carrying on about how Indians are being greedy, but the commercials never once tell you anything about the proposition itself. So you end up having to read the '[Arizona] Republic' or some other piece of nonsense. But since I'm one of those nasty Easterners, I'll probably vote straight Democrat. It's just how it goes. I didn't want to vote for Bill Clinton, but I had to -- even though I figured he was white trash.

I don't usually mention that I have been in movies, because I'm afraid people will say, 'Well, I don't watch black-and-white films.' Most people don't know who I am.

I used to try to get through one film a year, but I always chose movies that I thought would fail, so that I wouldn't have to deal with the fame thing. I turned down Alfred Hitchcock when he first asked me to be in one of his movies.

[on appearing in Family Plot (1976)] Alfred Hitchcock was a wonderful man. He always wanted emotionless people in his movies. There was a scene in our film, where Karen Black was acting, acting, acting -- all that Lee Strasberg human-struggle stuff. And it took her so long to get those tears going, and Mr. Hitchcock turned to the cameraman and said, "We will just photograph the actors' feet in this scene." He wanted a beautiful woman who wasn't showing her life's history in a scene.

I think the only thing that drew me to acting in the first place was the group of people I was working with: Edward Asner, Paul Sills, Mike Nichols, Elaine May. And all I really wanted to do back then was rehearsal. I was in it for the process, and I really resented having to go out and do a performance for an audience, because the process stopped; it had to freeze and be the same every night. It wasn't as interesting.