Top 100 Linney Quotes
#1. Linney moves in the world with such firm, certain steps, being with her can make you forget your own confusion, at least for a little while.
Marisa De Los Santos
#2. I told my agent which women I aspire to have a career like: Frances McDormand, Kate Winslet, Laura Linney and Emma Thompson - character actresses who have something to say. I also said that I loved Madeline Kahn and Jessica Lange.
Rachael Harris
#3. I remember when I was doing 'The Crucible' on Broadway with Laura Linney, and Arthur Miller had been in rehearsal with us and was on stage on opening night. She turned to me during the curtain call and said, 'Let's make sure we remember this.'
John Benjamin Hickey
#4. I did a movie called 'The Savages' with Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, where I played a nurse, and it showed me in a different role from what I played on 'The Wire.' It showed my range as an actor.
Gbenga Akinnagbe
#5. I actually love actresses who look like they feel really natural. I like Patricia Clarkson, Laura Linney, Frances McDormand. Those are actresses where the second they show up on screen you're like, oh my gosh, this movie just got so much better.
Anna Kendrick
#6. You're in a scene with Laura Linney or Oliver Platt or John Hickey or Alan Alda and these amazing actors and actresses, and you're like, 'Oh my God, I haven't even started; I'm nothing compared to these people!'
Gabriel Basso
#7. A lot of what is publicized now is really pretty trivial stuff - you know, what I eat for breakfast, where I have my pedicures, questions that I just cannot for the life of me understand why someone would want to know that.
Laura Linney
#9. With big, emotional roles it's very easy, especially if you've grown up in the American school of acting, to exploit your own pain. You have to be careful about that, because 9 times out of 10, your pain is not appropriate to the character.
Laura Linney
#10. 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.
Laura Linney
#11. My parents were divorced and I would spend weekends with my father.
Laura Linney
#12. You can watch someone on-stage cry and cry - but in the audience you feel nothing. It's easy to become indulgent. For me, what's important is the story first.
Laura Linney
#14. I grew up in Manhattan and, since my father was a playwright, all I ever wanted to be was a stage actress.
Laura Linney
#15. I've always thought that I'm sexy in my own right, but not in a way that people thought was bankable.
Laura Linney
#16. 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.
Laura Linney
#18. What I love about a play is that it's such an investment because only time can create a lot of what happens onstage.
Laura Linney
#19. I tend to make low-budget movies but, yeah, I make more money than I ever thought I would make.
Laura Linney
#20. I've seen the greatest actors in the world, transcendent talents, who can't find a home.
Laura Linney
#21. I mean, the idea of losing a parent is really inconceivable. I think there's just an undertone of dread about the subject, so people don't talk about it and don't prepare for it.
Laura Linney
#22. 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.
Laura Linney
#24. The entertainment industry is terrified of silence.
Laura Linney
#25. 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.
Laura Linney
#26. I think the way we talk about cancer has really evolved. I remember the way my grandmother used to talk about it, like a death sentence, no-one would even mention the word.
Laura Linney
#27. I crave a cone of silence every once in while.
Laura Linney
#28. I don't consider myself a celebrity and I don't consider myself a star.
Laura Linney
#29. The goal seems to me at times just to be business first.
Laura Linney
#30. Working with special needs children is hard.
Laura Linney
#31. 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.
Laura Linney
#32. What people can survive and what they don't survive is shocking to me. Someone can go to Iraq and be blown to bits and survive. Someone can trip and fall on the street and they die - that's that.
Laura Linney
#33. 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.
Laura Linney
#34. I'm lucky because I don't like being in the sun a whole lot, just because the repercussions for me - I feel it, I go very red.
Laura Linney
#35. The basic laws of good acting are the same, but everything about the experience is different-your job responsibility, the time you spend on it.
Laura Linney
#36. I think that when you do an adaptation for theater, it's either a marriage or a love affair..and so tremendous is my esteem and affection of many years for Ernest Gaines, there was no question but that I would be a very faithful adapter..which I did do.
Romulus Linney
#37. 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.
Laura Linney
#38. I don't think I'm exactly gregarious, you know. I'm not usually known as the loud person in the room.
Laura Linney
#39. 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.
Laura Linney
#40. People's view of cancer will change when they have their own relationship with cancer, which everyone will, at some point.
Laura Linney
#41. I had a good imagination and I still have one; a child-like imagination that hasn't gone away.
Laura Linney
#42. Revision, once well done, becomes a sort of automatic itch which you scratch in the next work without thinking about it.
Romulus Linney
#43. Fame didn't happen to me in my 20s, it has been a gradual thing which probably makes it easier to deal with.
Laura Linney
#45. You know when someone's over-flattering you in a way. You smile but you can't believe it.
Laura Linney
#46. I'm sure my father had more to do with my career than I would like to give him credit for. I would love to think it was all me!
Laura Linney
#48. All the things that most kids hated, I loved. I loved that things were asked of me and that, much to my surprise, I was able to do them. I loved the 10 o'clock bedtime. I loved the responsibility.
Laura Linney
#49. I am very lucky, because for the most part people are very nice to me, and I am still able to go about my life and ride the subway and all that.
Laura Linney
#50. I find the whole disdain for ageing crazy.
Laura Linney
#51. Just because you're not famous, doesn't mean you're not good.
Laura Linney
#52. A play's got to be a dramatic event, not a lyrical event. It's not music, it's not poetry, it's not dance, it's not narrative - it's dramaticit's about conflict. It's about forces coming together.
Romulus Linney
#53. I have an instinct to want to be part of a group of people. I feel safe there. That's why I was in school for so long.
Laura Linney
#54. If there's one thing that I've done on purpose it's to take whatever job, so long as it's interesting and challenging, whether it's theatre, radio, TV or film.
Laura Linney
#55. I could have gone to the gym for three hours a day and bought into all that, but I just wasn't interested.
Laura Linney
#56. At school I was always trying to con my teachers into letting me act out book reports instead of writing them.
Laura Linney
#57. Traits like humility, courage, and empathy are easily overlooked - but it's immensely important to find them in your closest relationships.
Laura Linney
#58. I had learning disabilities, and I couldn't express myself in the written word.
Laura Linney
#60. I don't think you should exploit your own pain.
Laura Linney
#61. 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.
Laura Linney
#62. I just have to concentrate on doing what I do.
Laura Linney
#63. I grew up in Manhattan on the Upper East Side.
Laura Linney
#64. I can scarcely stand to have a manicure. I have to have them because you don't want to look like a disgusting human being - it's self-care and it has to happen, but I get very restless.
Laura Linney
#65. The only really conscious decision I made was to cast my net wide and if the work was good, to do it.
Laura Linney
#66. I'm profoundly lucky. I really like it. I really like my work. I've liked it since I was 5 years old.
Laura Linney
#67. I think everybody handles things very differently and you can conjecture, but until you're put in that situation, you really don't know.
Laura Linney
#68. 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.
Laura Linney
#69. People can't really place me. They're not really sure who I am.
Laura Linney
#71. Some people's personalities are so compelling that they command attention.
Laura Linney
#72. If you have two parents who have to work, who want to work, you need to have someone to guide your child.
Laura Linney
#73. I just want to say, 'Go work! It doesn't matter what it is. Work begets work. Just go!'
Laura Linney
#74. A magnetic personality doesn't necessarily indicate a good heart.
Laura Linney
#76. 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.
Laura Linney
#77. There are three primal urges in human beings: food, sex, and rewriting some else's play.
Romulus Linney
#78. I know what people want to hear is the connection with the son, Roger, when you have a child. I would love to tell that there was an epiphany as to what it is to be a mom, but I didn't feel any difference there.
Laura Linney
#79. I'm very hard on my bags because I tend to carry a lot of stuff with me.
Laura Linney
#80. Things get complicated at times, so there are certainly moments when you wish your life were different. That's true for everybody, not just people in our profession. But there's nothing I feel like I gave up professionally. I'm absolutely doing what I enjoy.
Laura Linney
#81. I think everyone's experience with a terminal disease is so deeply personal and unique to the person, the context in which they're living and the relationships that they have.
Laura Linney
#82. 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.
Laura Linney
#83. We all have a limited amount and that it's a privilege to grow old. That's something that I think a lot of people have forgotten in this very fast-paced world where youth is overly celebrate.
Laura Linney
#84. 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.
Laura Linney
#85. I love to work in all sorts of different situations.
Laura Linney
#86. I hope that anyone I worked with wouldn't exploit our relationship.
Laura Linney
#87. 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.
Laura Linney
#88. Fear, anxiety and neurosis: that's just in the suitcase when you're an actor.
Laura Linney
#89. I'm noise-sensitive. It's always better for me if things are quiet, so I can concentrate.
Laura Linney
#91. When your life is being threatened there's an instinctive urge to fight. You fight for the time you have, for your relationships.
Laura Linney
#92. My experience is that's rare - that you have a script that is ... what they call 'film-ready.'
Laura Linney
#93. 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.
Laura Linney
#95. You have to relish the challenge of television.
Laura Linney
#96. 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.
Laura Linney
#97. It's very hard to put forth a film that's about love and the joy of love and for it not to be patronising and not make people nauseous or make them roll their eyes.
Laura Linney
#98. I always laugh to myself when I listen to some really big A-list star saying that they are just a normal person.
Laura Linney
#99. 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!
Laura Linney
#100. The good thing is that I'm always honest.
Laura Linney
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