Jessica Lange Quotes - Page 3

Families survive, one way or another. You have a tie, a connection that exists long after death, through many lifetimes.

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

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.

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.

It took Sydney Pollack a long time to get me to do Tootsie. I asked myself if I wanted to play some frothy, ditzy character after I had just done Frances. Obviously, I'm thrilled that I did.

In families there is always the mythology. My father died when my kids were quite young still, and yet they still tell his stories. That is how a person lives on.

Yes, and you should question your government.

The thing with psychoanalysis is I know basically what happened in my childhood. I know where things went wrong and I know what my mother said at one point and what my father said at one point.

I like to work in costumes, makeup, and hair that allow me tremendous freedom.

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.

I have made decisions based from purely an actor's point of view.

At a certain age, death becomes familiar to you-or a loss becomes familiar-the tragedies that are more commonplace in life.

To work on the actual location I think is great. This thing of going to Canada and pretending you're in New York, it's terrible.

So much of my sense of who I am is tied to mothering. When they left home, I fell into a huge, empty, black hole. Your children are grown and your career has slowed down - all the stuff that took up so much attention is gone, and you're left with expansive time and space.

TV is sort of the only way to go for an actress my age to make a decent salary; with independent films, you just can't.

There was a period of time when I was very political, when I was at the university. It was like the late '60s, early '70s and I was a dissident like everybody else I guess. Now I follow it but there's nothing that really grabs me. The most fascinating thing to me right now is China.

What can I say? I hate Bush; I despise him and his entire administration, everything he represents and everything he has tried to do, not only internationally, which is horrific, but domestically as well. In my country the atmosphere is poisoned. Unbreathable for those of us who are not on the right. So thank you for inviting me to this festival and allowing me to leave there for a few days.

Photography was a blessing because it filled my time.

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.

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.

My one big regret was that there were no scenes that I could play with Eva Marie Saint. I hounded them. I said figure out some way, I just want to play a scene with this woman. But there was no way to make it work.

Usually, you get a script and you have the whole story. All the acts are there, for a play. You know what happens in the first, second and third acts, and you know how it starts, where you go and where it finishes. [With American Horror Story: Asylum], it's a whole new experience. I don't know where it's going, and I don't know what's going to happen next. It's been an interesting way to work. It's made me work in a much more fluid, braver way, just taking every chance that comes along.

When I am home for like a two-year stretch, I get antsy, because I want to work.

The worst is when I talk myself into something. Sometimes you take things because you want to work with a certain actor, or you want to work with a director, even if the script or the part's not that great.

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.