Quotes from Katherine Waterston

I don't think Paul Thomas Anderson has a standard approach to anything.

I feel a kind of permission and freedom in my work that I might not allow myself in my real life.

I wonder sometimes if I've got in the habit of only being courageous when someone else has written the words I have to say.

I was barely in 'Taking Woodstock.'

Can't remember a time when I didn't want to be an actor... though it felt like something I couldn't do until I grew up. I mean, I knew kids could be actors - I recall seeing them on my dad's shoots and getting jealous.

There are people who have really high expectations for what we're doing. I have to not think about that so that I can be free and play around every day and not feel like I have to get it right. You want to be loose.

I love that feeling. I guess I love escaping my life, really. I love going into another world and feeling for this amount of time that this is it, this is the world I'm going to live in. You feel it more during the rehearsal process.

The minute you get cast, you worry they've made the most terrible mistake. There's a really awkward stage between being hired and doing the job when it doesn't feel real.

I think it's quite common for actors to almost rely on their characters to exercise parts of themselves in their regular life they don't tend to explore so much.

Actors are sensitive freaks, but it amazes me that it is something that I haven't improved on over the years.

My first memory of the Harry Potter series was my little brother just falling into those books and not resurfacing until he was done. That J.K. Rowling got an entire generation reading is extraordinary - I'm amazed, thrilled, and proud to now be portraying one of that phenomenal writer's characters.

I thought acting was what grownups did. It was such a part of my childhood. I was already in love with performing before I knew there were other options. By then, it was too late.

Costume design is so important and really helpful, and I really love that aspect of character development, just figuring it out.

Usually on films, you get used to kind of being told, 'This is what you're going to wear, this is what you're going to hold, and remember, you're lucky to be here, and shut up.'

I've always wanted to play the villain. But the young girl is never the villain.

Acting is a community where you come in and out of each other's lives. I'm slightly envious of the Golden Age of Hollywood. It must have been frustrating to be owned by the studio, but it was also like being in a company, working with the same people, and that appeals to me.

I think connecting to a character is like connecting to any human being - either you like them or you don't. You might not be able to list the reasons why you love your best friend or what attracted you to them; it's just something that you feel - a connection, an understanding, or a curiosity that makes you want to get to know them.

The only way my mother's beauty really affected me was that I always assumed that someday I would look like her. Then, late in my teens, I looked at a photo of her when she was younger than I was then, and I realised, no, it's never going to happen.

We live in such hypersexualised yet totally prudish times. People have this expectation about everyone else's relationship to their own bodies.'Surely you must have shame about your body? Surely what's scariest for you as actor would be to stand in a room naked?' Believe me, I've been in so many more terrifying situations as a performer than that.

About 10 minutes before I found out that I had landed 'Fantastic Beasts', I got a residual check in the mail for zero dollars. On the check it said 'Advice Slip.' And I was like, 'Well, what's the advice? Go into another line of work?

You kind of wake up in the morning, and you don't see anybody but these actors until you go home at night and pass out and do it again. So it's structured a lot like the process when you're making a film. You just kind of get in that tunnel vision. I like that. I like when the rest of the world kind of quiets.

One of my earliest memories was when I was three, going to this full-length mirror in my parents' bathroom and saying into the mirror, 'You are going to be an actress.'

I guess whatever the director's energy is is kind of contagious on set, because, um, you know, it's a hierarchy, and we're all kind of looking to the director for guidance.

I didn't feel a specific pressure to prove myself because I had an actor in the family. I didn't feel that pressure to fill some big shoes or anything.