Quotes from Sissy Spacek

My biggest thrill in life is to read in the afternoon until I fall asleep and take a nap.

What's normal? I think I'm normal... Maybe I'm abnormal because I get such a thrill from real life, just real life, everyday things.

It's not seeing myself 40 feet tall on a movie screen - it's the work. That's what thrills me.

My parents were devoted. Civic minded. We had family counsels. Three of us children against two of them. We lived a 'Leave It to Beaver' time.

I've been into exercise my whole life, been a runner and been into health and fitness always.

I hated country music growing up, but it gets in your bone marrow, kind of like a disease.

Film is an amazing art form, but so is life. When your career and your life can work together, and one can support the other, it's just great.

I think that we all fantasize about that teeny tiny time in the film industry when women ruled, back in the '40s.

For a while, I just sang at a steakhouse. I would go from table to table and really just survived on tips.

I don't have any regrets, because I think life is like a creek. It kind of meanders along, and you instinctively do the things you are meant to do. There's no great plan except doing really good scripts, meeting great filmmakers. And I have to have something that I can bring to the role.

If you live only a movie-star life, you know only movie-star things. I needed to live a regular life with normal people around.

That was the magical thing about the Seventies: artists ruled. Because films were relatively low-budget, nobody cared. We could just go off and work.

There are classic horror films that, if you are a human being in this world, you have to have seen. They've become a part of our culture.

That's what I love about acting and love and drama and art: that humanness we all share.

I'm not paralyzed with fear, but I realize it is important to live as if there's no tomorrow, always trying to maintain your integrity and have no regrets.

My cousin, Rip Torn, persuaded me not to change my name. You shouldn't change what you are in the search for success.

I was always proud about being from Texas and, you know, maybe that was part of fearlessness. I love the fact that Texas is so big, but you don't feel small because of that.

There are fewer roles, and I've done so many things already that I don't want to repeat, so to find something you haven't done is harder. I don't want to play a country singer again.

It's really about the work - if you are doing it for the right reasons - really to illuminate the human condition.

The human condition is the human condition, and what we try to do is illuminate the human condition.

Jingle taps on the majorette boots were an important part of a little girl growing up in the South.

I lived an idyllic 'Huckleberry Finn' life in a tiny town. Climbing trees. Tagging after brothers. Happy. Barefoot on my pony. It was 'To Kill a Mockingbird'-esque.

It's difficult to just let go of a character. Especially after you've been preparing and researching for weeks.

You want to live your life and live it just as fully and as deeply as you can. That's your deep well of reserve. That's where you get all your - the fodder for your work.