Quotes from Jessica Lange

It comes down to something really simple: Can I visualize myself playing those scenes? If that happens, then I know that I will probably end up doing it.

If you're really in the process of photographing, you are absolutely aware. You are looking.

I have been a waitress, and I was a damn fine waitress too, let me tell you.

Box office success has never meant anything. I couldn't get a film made if I paid for it myself. So I'm not 'box office' and never have been, and that's never entered into my kind of mind set.

To my mind the election was stolen by George Bush and we have been suffering ever since under this man's leadership.

I've never been a sunny personality. I've never been outgoing. I'm a solitary person.

What I love about photography, and it's the same thing I love about acting, really, is that it forces you, like, right into the moment, where you can't be distracted, where you can't be, like, thinking about other things or ahead of yourself or behind yourself.

I never shot on sets, but if I was traveling somewhere or on location, I would always have my camera, and I'd always be - it's that kind of fly on the wall approach to photography, though. I don't engage the subject. I like to sneak around, skulk about in the dark.

I take a jazz class and I also take just a regular exercise class with a man who gives me acupressure treatments. It's just stretching and elongating the muscles.

The natural state of motherhood is unselfishness. When you become a mother, you are no longer the center of your own universe. You relinquish that position to your children.

For me, nothing has ever taken precedence over being a mother and having a family and a home.

I love being a mother. I loved being a daughter, a sister, a wife. I love being a woman with men. I love having given birth.

Yes, and you should question your government.

Moments of pure happiness...come upon you unexpectedly. Don't be too preoccupied to experience them.

I regret those times when I've chosen the dark side. I've wasted enough time not being happy.

The only place I've felt was really my home is my cabin up north. There's something in the water there that connects me to that place. There's also this sense of isolation and loneliness about it that I've never been able to shake.

It was easier to do Shakespeare than a lot of modern movie scripts that are so poorly written.

Once I started on 'Frances' I discovered it was literally a bottomless well. It devastated me to maintain that for eighteen weeks, to be immersed in this state of rage for twelve to eighteen hours a day. It spilled all over, into other areas of my life.

I like playing characters who are out there on the edge, where they can explode at any moment or fall off the precipice.

When you learn not to want things so badly, life comes to you.

Don't be absent from your own life.

I have a life that's just been a well of loneliness.

Acceptance and tolerance and forgiveness, those are life-altering lessons.

The natural state of motherhood is unselfishness. When you become a mother, you are no longer the center of your own universe. You relinquish that position to your children.