Quotes from Maggie Gyllenhaal

The older I get, the more vulnerable I get. But the part of me that resists that, that is stubborn and wants to bulldoze things, gets in my way.

I liked that idea. Someone who's trying to perform herself and not succeeding.

There are things that are really disappointing about being an actress in Hollywood that surprise me all the time.

I'm 37 and I was told recently I was too old to play the lover of a man who was 55. It was astonishing to me. It made me feel bad, and then it made me feel angry, and then it made me laugh.

One of the things I think is really problematic about something like [government] spyware is that it isn't transparent - because of that anonymity and that secrecy, there aren't laws to regulate it.

The real test will be having a family; when I have a family you have to come home, you have to eat dinner with your kids.

I would like to have a home in the country that I could go to. First in this country and the other in the Mediterranean.

After making 'Secretary,' it was a real shock to me to learn that some directors just aren't interested in what actors have to say. They just don't want to collaborate.

I want to have some effect on the way the world works in whatever way I can, and I also want to have the power to help get the movies that I think are important made.

I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn't a religion major really.

There was something to me that was really compelling about that woman, already knowing she couldn't get pregnant. When I made that movie I was maybe 24, and to be 24 and already know you can't get pregnant, that was really interesting to me.

Simple black-and-white thinking or action is always going to be problematic.

I want roles that challenge people to question where they are in life.

I'm still trying to figure out what the right line is between myself and the people I play. Sometimes I go too far one way or too far the other.

I have a raging temper. I'll shout and scream, then it passes like a wicked storm.

When I was in grade school in L.A., I really loved Cyndi Lauper. I did everything I could to look like her. I had wild outfits and always wore different coloured socks. I wore loads of ribbons in my hair and let them fall in my eyes.

I get magnetically pulled towards a project because there's something in it that offers me the opportunity to explore the edge of my understanding about myself.

On a film, I was always acting. I was either changing my clothes really quickly and wiping off the lipstick and putting on the other lipstick and then working constantly, constantly.

Describing someone as quirky is a way of erasing them. What does it even mean? In so many interviews over the years, that's how I'm described. It doesn't sit comfortably with me.

I don't think I'm a brilliant writer, but I'm a good writer, and it's just so empowering to get involved.

I made a movie where I played a girl that just got out of prison and we shot it very very quickly but very intensely-that took me a long time to get over.

A play is much easier to maintain your personal life with because if you're rehearsing, you're working like from 11 to 6 or 11 to 5 and you get to have your whole morning and your whole evening. When you're doing the play, you have all day.

Yes, I want to do good work. But just because a movie is small, it doesn't make it better. In fact, there are a lot of really horrible independent movies made.

I used to think that if I did my very best work, then everyone would love it, but I've realised that not everybody thinks the same things are good. It took me 30 years even to begin to see that.