Quotes from Laura Linney

I'm profoundly lucky. I really like it. I really like my work. I've liked it since I was 5 years old.

The only really conscious decision I made was to cast my net wide and if the work was good, to do it.

The entertainment industry is terrified of silence.

I don't want to spend my life in my 40s feeling bad about being in my 40s, and then all of a sudden I'm 50, and I will have missed a whole decade!

When your life is being threatened there's an instinctive urge to fight. You fight for the time you have, for your relationships.

It's very hard to put forth a film that's about love and the joy of love and for it not to be patronising and not make people nauseous or make them roll their eyes.

If there's one thing that I've done on purpose it's to take whatever job, so long as it's interesting and challenging, whether it's theatre, radio, TV or film.

I'm noise-sensitive. It's always better for me if things are quiet, so I can concentrate.

The good thing is that I'm always honest.

I am very lucky, because for the most part people are very nice to me, and I am still able to go about my life and ride the subway and all that.

My experience is that's rare - that you have a script that is... what they call 'film-ready.'

Fame didn't happen to me in my 20s, it has been a gradual thing which probably makes it easier to deal with.

With big, emotional roles it's very easy, especially if you've grown up in the American school of acting, to exploit your own pain. You have to be careful about that, because 9 times out of 10, your pain is not appropriate to the character.

I could have gone to the gym for three hours a day and bought into all that, but I just wasn't interested.

My parents were divorced and I didn't grow up with my father, but I spent a lot of time around him, and his influence on me has been profound.

What I love about a play is that it's such an investment because only time can create a lot of what happens onstage.

For me to have the opportunity to stay with one character for, God willing, a long period of time, is really exciting.

What I find so interesting about people is the choices they make, and how that effects their behavior, their sense of self and their relationships.

It is always good to explore the stuff you don't agree with, to try and understand a different lifestyle or foreign worldview. I like to be challenged in that way, and always end up learning something I didn't know.

That's my favorite food group: donut. I love the donut.

You have to relish the challenge of television.

People can't really place me. They're not really sure who I am. Sometimes they think I'm Helen Hunt. Sometimes they think I'm Laura Dern.

I had a good imagination and I still have one; a child-like imagination that hasn't gone away.

I have an instinct to want to be part of a group of people. I feel safe there. That's why I was in school for so long.