Quotes from Sissy Spacek

When I first met David Lynch, he was living in the stables of the American Film Institute... He'd work all night and have his crew lock him in during the day, and he'd sleep.

There is a long tradition of pungent living in the South. It was wonderful to have that imprinted on me so early in life. I already had my core when I left my little town in Texas.

Some families can experience terrible tragedy and deal with it, and others not. I find those things fascinating.

I think that no human gets away unscathed in this old life. We've all experienced loss and grief and pain and tragedy.

Our perception of celebrities in Hollywood is not the reality. The reality of our lives is so much like everyone else's life. We have family members we love, everyone gets up in the morning, they have three meals a day and they go about their business.

I like horseback riding. I like to hike. I play guitar and sing.

The name Sissy came because my brothers called me that.

Everybody who loves me calls me Sissy, so I guess that's just who I am. When I'm 80, they'll still be calling me Sissy. Oh, well, I guess there are worse things.

I studied homeopathy for years and years. Herbs and all kinds of acupuncture, acupressure, alternative medicine. I think it's just better to treat the whole person.

New York gets under your skin, and I think once you've fallen in love with New York, you take that with you. I love New York.

I didn't worry about leaving the fast lane - I was just so consumed with my baby that it seemed like the right thing to do. I never felt like I left New York, though. If you've lived in a place and loved it, you never feel like you left it.

Junior and senior high school years were not a good time.

Texas is just so rich with characters. Women who live alone in a little house on a thousand acres with nothing but cattle and a pickup truck. And an airplane.

My children came along at a perfect time in my life. My career was soaring, and they didn't care who I thought I was. They just wanted to eat. It brought me down to earth.

I used to play softball every summer back in Quitman. My two brothers demanded I be tough. There were certain girls they wouldn't let me invite over because they were too feminine and fragile.

Hollywood's fickle. It's always been that way, and it will always be that way. And it's always going to be somebody new and exciting comes along. That's just the way it works, and it will always work that way. And I think that if you give it everything to the exclusion of your own real life and family, you've sold yourself down the river.

There's a real danger in trying to stay king of the mountain. You stop taking risks, you stop being as creative, because you're trying to maintain a position. Apart from anything else that really takes the fun out of it.

I had a dozen years to act before starting a family, then found that motherhood dwarfed everything else. Once or twice a year, I take a project that appeals to me for its redeeming social value.

There's something about Southern characters.

I think people in the north and the south and the east and the west, anywhere they come from, are just as interesting, and they're humans. They have the same realm of emotions that we all have. But I'm just more drawn to the Southern character and the different types, and Southern literature is so lyrical and so wonderful.

I've done some of my best work in films that fell right through the cracks, so I try to not make career moves but to build a body of work.

I think the movie business, you meet people, and you work intensely with them, and you have these relationships - there's an intimacy to it and a familiarity to the relationship because you're having to let go of all your barriers so you can let people in and work with them.

If somebody wants to think of me as a movie star, that's fine, that's great. It sort of makes me giggle.

I'm a fool for a brilliant filmmaker. And for someone who wants to try new things.