Quotes from Frances McDormand

If you want to talk about cultural appropriation, we have to go back to the Greeks.

When you lose a spouse, you're a widow or widower; when you lose your parents, you're an orphan. When you lose a child, there's no word in the English language for that position, that place that you're left.

The only power you have is the word no.

I think awards are good for the movie. They can bring a new audience to the movie. I've always claimed that things like that don't get you work. Work gets you work. That's my blue-collar, protestant work ethic.

In my theater work, I've had much more three-dimensional, broader-stroke characters.

My son smelled like a cinnamon bun, and that smell entered into my biological being, and it became an imperative that I keep him alive at all costs, so then there's this monster - this tiger or lion - that comes forward in you to protect them. And it doesn't stop. It doesn't matter if they become men or women.

I have friends who are movie stars, and I think it's just as hard a job as being a working actor. But it's a different job, and it's not the one I want.

I've made a professional reputation playing working-class, middle-class, American women. There's a real sense of stoicism and pragmatism and strength and lyricism of a woman like that.

A 90-minute time frame is not long enough to tell a good female story, and that's why long-format television has become so great for female storytelling and for female performers and directors and writers.

I tried taking a year off when Pedro was a toddler because I really wanted to be around, but it wasn't good for any of us.

I haven't wanted to play a mother for a long time because I am one

If, when I leave this earth, I'm remembered for 'Fargo,' so be it. But I think old Marge Gunderson is gonna get a run for her money with Olive Kittredge.

There is simply too much of my life that is involved in my work that I couldn't replicate in any other way.

The crew on 'Three Bilboards,' by the way, is one of the best I've ever worked with. And that's not hyperbole.

I think that ageism is a cultural illness; it's not a personal illness.

We don't need a lot of initiatives for women in film; what we need is money.

I've got a rubber face. It has always served me very well and really helps, especially as I get older, because I still have all my road map intact, and I can use it at will.

I never trusted good-looking boys.

The only power you have is the word no.

Most women's pictures are as boring and as formulaic as men's pictures. In place of a car chase or a battle scene, what you get is an extreme closeup of a woman breaking down.

That's another great thing about getting older. Your life is written on your face.

Yale? I was at Yale on a scholarship.

I was completely naive about the business of being an actor. My family didn't go to the theater or to the movies. We watched television like every 1960s small-town American family, and I certainly never thought about being on TV. I thought I was going to be a classical actor in the grand tradition.

I'm trained in the theater, and acting, for me, is about the imaginative life I create for myself, not about basing it on something real. I think that whatever I create becomes the reality for the audience.