Quotes from Holly Hunter

The unknown makes people uncomfortable.

I think that, initially, I was most passionate about music and particularly about playing the piano. I started playing when I was nine, and I was obsessed with it, really. I wouldn't even go spend the night at a friend's unless they had a piano. But I didn't have the chops, the extraordinary talent to be able to play the piano professionally.

I started doing repertory theatre in upstate New York when I was 15, went back when I was 16, and by that time decided that I really wanted to study drama seriously and go to an acting conservatory called Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

I would love to work more - I really would - but there is not a lot of stuff around and the stuff that is around is not very complicated; it tends to lie a little flat

I don't offer advice to actors only because I've seen actors become successful through ways that would never even occur to me or that wouldn't work for me.

I don't offer advice to actors only because I've seen actors become successful through ways that would never even occur to me or that wouldn't work for me. But this has worked for me: Never memorizing a scene.

I think it's really odd, too, that the public is so privy to how much money the actors make and what movies cost. It seems to me to be beside the point. When I go to a movie I really don't want to think about the money. I want to see the story.

I'm too small and too short. I thought that was odd; that should be a non-issue to me.

I've never had a career of that kind of box office power. I've always learned the hard way.

As we get older, people close down. We get less adaptive, less flexible - literally. Curiosity can diminish, and you want safety. You want what you know.

When the family gets together once a year in Georgia for New Year's Eve, we listen to music, all kinds of music. That's what we do.

If you've had intimacy in your life, you can be intimate onscreen. I mean, come on - I didn't know how to hold a gun, but I could play a cop.

So much European cinema has open arms to stories carried by women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. And America is a little behind in that.

In my real life, I see people who are really enjoying their lives – I mean, really enjoying their lives – and they take joy in their daily obligations; they just do. And I believe that at a certain point, you've got to choose to be that way. You choose to approach your life that way. Or it's all kind of a drag until Friday.

I'm basically talking to the audience, standing alone, describing the weather. It's very rudimentary, the dialogue, saying what the weather is like that day.

The rhythm of my career has always been very static, staccato and then silent, and then a lot of work, and then none

The happiest person in the world has struggled. And none of us are perfect. And people can judge. There's so much judgment going on. And I just don't think that's what God's about.

Even very ordinary people, upon closer examination, can often look extraordinary.

Most of the time I live a fully anonymous life, which is the way I like it.

Being somebody who's like a theater geek that I am, I can just go right back to Aeschylus and Euripides and Sophocles: they were writing about gods and goddesses versus humans, and how gods could distort, pervert, or help people get what they want.

My career has never really been a vertical kind of thing. I mean, it's always been a bit difficult for me.

More and more movies have been pressured to allow reporters and TV cameras to come onto the set while you're working, and I find that a real violation.

In the life of a director - these days in particular - when it really does take so long to do a movie, with a few exceptions, actors may never work with a director again, even if they're great friends.

I never thought about moving to L.A.; I always wanted to be in New York. I moved there, and now I still have a kind of love affair with the city.