I believe imagination to be a uniquely human gift. The reason I like my job, and have liked it for more than half a century, is that I get to use my imagination.

I think mothers get a raw deal in American culture, so I've been defending them. I have three daughters, and I know that as they become mothers, they got a lot more gentle towards me!

My job always is to play a person, not to judge her.

There was this wonderful trick of going to the theater with my parents and sitting in the audience under the watchful eye of an usher, and then these other people would come on the stage: They spoke differently and had different clothes and hair. Afterward, they would come back, and they were my parents again. It was magic.

I am pretty sure that all young human beings have, at one time or another in their growing-up, been actors. They have used their imaginations to carry them away from painful or confusing situations... have imagined themselves to be more powerful or beautiful or brave or loving than they are.

I wish it was possible to do the work and not have to talk about it, but it is traditional in the theater to go into the village square and bang the drum and say, 'Come see this show, come see this show.'

In sixth and seventh grade, my two best friends and I pretended to be horses. Every day after school, we would gallop around, whinnying and stamping our hooves and tossing our manes - for hours.

What I like is the acting itself. But I'm a lousy celebrity. I'm not interested in selling my private life. I take my private feelings to the work, but I want there to be a difference between me and whoever it is I'm playing.

Many more people saw me on TV than will ever get to see me on stage, but I do love being in the same room as the people I'm telling the story to.

I never played the 'decoration,' I always played the one who suffered. And then I got very lucky in my middle career, when I started playing the hero, which at that point was quite rare for women.