Quotes from Mary Steenburgen

I know that's why I became an actress. In my dream world, I could get mad and scream and yell, and if somebody died, they got up again. In real life, I didn't dare try it.

My dad had a series of heart attacks when I was a little girl, and our world was shaped by these huge, traumatic events.

The accordion came from just having a desire to play music. Somehow, I have slowly taught myself.

'Last Man On Earth' is just one of the most original projects I've ever been involved with.

I want women, especially young women, to create a world where your success is not based on being young.

I've found that most people who studied when they were little, even if they never took another tap class, it's percussive, so it stays in your body, the muscle memory of it.

I panic at parties. I don't like talking absolutely nothing and pretending, so I'm quite odd socially.

For me, acting has often been solitary. You're all together, and then boom, you're gone.

If there's an addiction in the Clinton family, it's to problem solving.

I love to paint. And I have another profession - an interior design business.

You've never seen anything until you've seen David Mamet be an Edwardian lady. He always conveys what he means, but he's so... masculine.

'Justified' had such dead-on beautiful scripts that you didn't want to mess with it.

Whenever we start a new TV series, there's also a lot of question marks, and part of that is finding who you are.

People that want it to just be funny should not despair, because there is so much true crazy comedy coming up.

I feel like I'm attracted to characters who have one foot firmly planted on the ground. And their heads up in the clouds somewhere. Practical dreamers. They try to impress you that they've got this whole thing figured out, but there's more going on inside their heads than you might imagine.

I got my SAG card on my first movie, 'Goin' South,' with Jack Nicholson in 1978.

I helped found Artists for New South Africa, but it used to be called Artists for Free South Africa. Alfre Woodard and a bunch of us started this.

I remember when I was growing up and watching southern people depicted on television, I thought, 'Well, based on what I'm seeing, I guess I'm supposed to be stupid and racist.' It's still, sadly, the easy route for a writer to go.

Anything to do with the South resonates with me, because I'm Southern.

There are no worse cliches than southern cliches. They make my skin crawl.

At one point, I kind of looked in the mirror and said, 'You know, you're a mom. You're a wife. People count on you; you can't go off the deep end into this kind of crazy musical swirl.'

I had a sense of mortality since I was a little girl, which has to do with my father, who nearly died eight times in my childhood. He had eight heart attacks.

Ultimately, there are only two emotions: love and fear. And pretty much anything else you want to name can be broken down into one of those.

I wanted a relationship like the one my mother and father had. It wasn't perfect; they had to work on it. But there was an unbelievable mutual respect.