Laura Dern Quotes

Ben Stiller, who I love and who is a friend and is such an incredible actor - he's hilarious, obviously, but I thought his performance in 'Greenberg' was extraordinary.

- Laura Dern

Having egregious divorces - where you just hate each other - is really the easy way out.

- Laura Dern

Stay true to your own voice, and don't worry about needing to be liked or what anybody else thinks. Keep your eyes on your own paper.

- Laura Dern

I tend to always love material with flawed protagonists and morally ambiguous people.

- Laura Dern

I grew up with a tribe of amazing women, but certainly my mother and my godmother really modeled women as actors.

- Laura Dern

I always wanted to do a 'Ms. Smith Goes to Washington.'

- Laura Dern

It excites me to go to a movie and be reminded that I'm human, and I'm filled with opposites, and I'm built with flaws. Part of growth and healing is recognizing that.

- Laura Dern

I can't say 'I'm proud to say' - because it's not a choice for many Americans - but I can say I'm fortunate enough to not be raising my kids on McDonald's.

- Laura Dern

I've worked with David Lynch since I was 17, and working with him is home and family; being around Alexander Payne is home and family, Jonathan Demme. There are directors... Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson... They are directors where I create homes.

- Laura Dern

I worked with HBO on 'Recount,' and we had a wonderful experience together. I'm such a fan of HBO and how much flexibility they give in character as well as schedule.

- Laura Dern

If you're looking to be loved for a part, it's great and enticing to be adorable in a romantic comedy. But then, as an actor, you get stuck.

- Laura Dern

I was on the cover of a lot of magazines, and there were compliments about beauty and fashion and what I was wearing. Man, if you get locked into that, you can lose your freedom as an actress.

- Laura Dern

I think it's about not just the crisis you're in, but how do you get to the other side? How do we heal? How do we survive this experience while remaining hopeful instead of filled with despair? That's what interests me.

- Laura Dern

It's my deepest interest as an actor: I love discovering how human beings work, how their flaws reveal themselves - how to learn and grow from that - and how characters teach me things as a woman and as a parent.

- Laura Dern

What I consider a good part for a woman and what some other Hollywood people think are good women's parts are very different. I don't want to play the supportive girlfriend who has nine scenes and just loves that man, maybe cheats on him in one scene but will always be there, and I mean - give me a break.

- Laura Dern

My daughter wants to do yoga with me and wants to be in the theater thing, and I can't tell her, 'Don't be an actress.' My son loves guitar and loves to be in a band and wants his iTunes downloaded with all this old-school hip-hop so he understands where hip-hop came from.

- Laura Dern

Irvin Kershner, no matter what anyone says, has done some great work. 'Eyes of Laura Mars' is an incredible movie.

- Laura Dern

I know that I've seen a mannerism, or a way I've cried, or something, where I see a flash of my parents.

- Laura Dern

I remember there being a period of time when I had a baby, and I was so sleep-deprived that I'd get into having no filter, and that was not good.

- Laura Dern

I feel so lucky to have a mom who is not only an extraordinary actor but someone who is game enough to not worry about our relationship versus what we play in movies or television.

- Laura Dern

All I can start with is what moves me and feels like a great challenge as an actor and I think is saying something unusual or irreverent or human - honest in some way.

- Laura Dern

I love Clint Eastwood, and I wish to work with him again. He's completely irreverent about everything, including his own beautiful work.

- Laura Dern

At the end of the day, you have to sit with the scripts and decide where your heart is.

- Laura Dern

If you have a movie coming out, and people are talking about you, the amount of scripts will build.

- Laura Dern

I certainly wouldn't mind if 'Jurassic Park' turns out to be commercially successful, and somebody says, 'Hey, you were in a box-office hit, and if you want to do another movie, we'll give you five million dollars to make it.'

- Laura Dern

I'm not averse to being a supporting character. I try to pick parts where I can add something.

- Laura Dern

It's a strange world, as David Lynch would say.

- Laura Dern

I made a commitment to myself; that I wanted to be an actress, and I wanted to do films that make a difference. It has to move people.

- Laura Dern

When you're first reading the script and thinking about playing the part, it's slightly daunting. It's easy to question, 'Is an audience going to like me? And is that my job?'

- Laura Dern

For me, the greatest good fortune I have being raised by actors is I came in knowing that a career is the ebb and flow.

- Laura Dern

Every role is a new form of surrender.

- Laura Dern

Like anything else, acting can become boring - a chore, really - if there isn't any challenge. And I like taking challenges. Just when people think they have me figured out, I like to surprise them.

- Laura Dern

My dad was always interested in characters he didn't understand - he was such a great bad guy in movies. And that is really the thing that calls me to the material often: something I struggle to understand in human behaviour.

- Laura Dern

Something that I've cared about deeply my whole career is getting to work with filmmakers and inventors of stories that are hysterical because they are just so painfully true.

- Laura Dern

There are people who consider it almost unpatriotic to be inquisitive and to be truthful about your opinions.

- Laura Dern

It's lovely to be considered pretty and lovely to do photo shoots, and I just love fashion. But I'm proud that I did the characters I wanted to do.

- Laura Dern

I was raised Catholic, and my grandmother taught me to stay. As a teenager, I thought if you went on a date, you should stay for a couple of years. I didn't realize that if he wasn't your cup of tea, you got to leave.

- Laura Dern

Decision-making is very scary for me.

- Laura Dern

Going to the Academy Awards is something I remember since I was six, when I went with my mom for the first time, 14 with my dad, you know, and there I am, at 22, 23, whatever I was, sitting next to my mom. You know, and then again, there with my dad. Like, there's a beauty to it, and I care deeply about film history.

- Laura Dern

Me and Woody Harrelson, we're twins. We're the same person. I should only make movies with him.

- Laura Dern

Luckily, I was raised by people who'd already seen all the yuck stuff, which is why they originally didn't want me to act. I understood the difference between getting a part at a Hollywood party and getting a job.

- Laura Dern

With 'Mask,' 'Smooth Talk' and 'Blue Velvet,' I loved the specific experiences so much. Each one was a specific filmmaker with a specific vision.

- Laura Dern

I think my mom exposed me to the concept of using your voice for anything you care about.

- Laura Dern

My mother opened a bank account for me when I made $60 on my first day of work as an extra. She's that kind of mother.

- Laura Dern

I like to play people who are deeply flawed, and I want to find the good nature in them. I even try to be kind to myself when I've made big mistakes.

- Laura Dern

I don't want to mess with my face. So I'm becoming fluent in French so I can go to France and make French films when I'm 60.

- Laura Dern

At 12, turned 13, made a movie with Sex Pistols and The Clash. Learned about a lot of things I never knew and hope will never know again. Don't know how my parents let me do that.

- Laura Dern

The really courageous and bold thing is to make movies about human behaviour.

- Laura Dern

I'm interested in flawed protagonists. I was raised on them.

- Laura Dern

Having been raised by actors who love moral ambiguity and flawed protagonists, I feel like it's sort of in the blood to want to take it on.

- Laura Dern

People now tell me it's a good thing I stayed away from teen films. Well, it wasn't my choice. I wasn't hired.

- Laura Dern

Growth doesn't hurt. This is what I've learned. In the end, it doesn't hurt. It hurts while it's happening. But in the end, you know, for life, for parenting, and for the arts, it's not a bad - not a bad thing to try for.

- Laura Dern

I love when actors can let go of where and how they have to do it, and just that we do it. That we are flawed and human, and don't worry about how we look or who we are, or that it seems too old of a character if we're still young.

- Laura Dern

For me, the key is years of the blessed filmmakers I've worked with giving me permission to be bold and jump off cliffs and to be boundaryless. I would put David Lynch at the top of that list.

- Laura Dern

I care a lot about big food and everyone's right to healthy, nutritious food and what's caused obesity in America and obesity in children in America.

- Laura Dern

In American culture we are supposed to take a pill when we're depressed or in grief as opposed to actually feeling.

- Laura Dern

God bless nannies.

- Laura Dern

I've seen 3-D movies where it seems a little crude or too in-your-face.

- Laura Dern

Unfortunately, I was making comedies in my 20s, but other people didn't realize they were comedies.

- Laura Dern

I have a very wonderfully, bizarrely amazing relationship with my mother in that we've been through a myriad of emotions because we've acted together and played all these different kinds of mother-daughters.

- Laura Dern

Starting my career as a kid, I was doing what jobs I got.

- Laura Dern

I'm interested in human nature. That's why I chose to become an actor.

- Laura Dern

Hopefully, film inspires you to think about human nature. It make us consider how we treat strangers and our most intimate.

- Laura Dern

Any journey of a creative person has, you know, really unusual challenges and years where you don't work and years where you work.

- Laura Dern

I think people do their bravest work when given an elusive canvas. That would be seemingly the weirdest, but also the most wonderful.

- Laura Dern

What a cool job to be part of - whether it's doing lighting or acting or serving food on set. You're part of telling a story that hopefully has an essential component, and that's super exciting to me.

- Laura Dern

Sadly, half of marriages end in divorce. Half of my girl friends and male friends have been through one, and their kids are doing great. There's no shame around it - unless you want to project that on to yourself - but certainly there's no longer cultural shame. Everyone is walking through it.

- Laura Dern

It's interesting to play a real-life person who has already been a character on 'Saturday Night Live.'

- Laura Dern

I really don't consider myself to be a conventional Hollywood star. I've never really been marketed by the big studios to do mass market box office films.

- Laura Dern

We like our archetypes and heroes to be what they are at face value. And life doesn't work out like that.

- Laura Dern

There are a lot more female writers wanting to direct their own material and hopefully will be given the opportunity.

- Laura Dern

I hope we can be consummate artists as women or revolutionaries, or whatever women want to be, and also have love, not only for ourselves but from a partner.

- Laura Dern

You'll be offered the 'lead' in this new hot film with such-and-such A-list director, 'a fabulous part' - a fabulous part? A fabulous part is a character with a soul, who starts here and goes to there, you know? There aren't many of those.

- Laura Dern

I've got the sort of personality that requires me to find some sort of release, and for me, it's performing.

- Laura Dern

I like movies about longing and desperation, and dark and light things, stories about people struggling to raise children, and to have relationships and be intimate with each other.

- Laura Dern

I'm moved by people who see the world differently than others. People who see the world with a longing for its poetry often can be broken people.

- Laura Dern

I have never been someone who applied 'work begets work' to my career, sometimes unfortunately.

- Laura Dern

You don't always get to work as much as you like, because I'm waiting to find things that I care about. Sometimes that's frustrating.

- Laura Dern

I care a lot about fragrance not only in my life, but sometimes it feels right while working on a character.

- Laura Dern

If we could all figure out a way to just be true to ourselves and have a good time doing what we're doing, it would be a lot more fun.

- Laura Dern

David Lynch is like that - every sound, every detail to the end of making the film, he never gives up. It has to be perfect.

- Laura Dern

I knew you had to go in and audition and maybe they'd hire you, and that's where you start. I had a good understanding about press: that it's the actor's responsibility to publicize his or her films.

- Laura Dern

You know someone is your favorite person when you've done a day of press, listened to yourself ad nauseam, listened to them tell every story, and when it ends, it's like, 'Are we going to eat something?'

- Laura Dern

I was raised in the '70s, and I've worked with people I love, and I've been on sets with my parents, with people who run a set and require of actors a sense of liberty and freedom and exploration and failure into brave achievement.

- Laura Dern

Wild at Heart made a few people angry-they thought I was exploiting women by showing that when a woman says no she really means yes.

- Laura Dern

I was raised on movie sets, and I decided for myself at a very young age that it was what I wanted to do.

- Laura Dern

There are artists or filmmakers or cinematographers who have had long careers who, maybe to reinvent themselves or just to stay in a secure place, layer it on or ham it up, if I can use that expression, or make grand choices that don't feel as authentic as what they did to make us fall in love with them in the first place.

- Laura Dern

Meditation is a practice that is considered mainstream: The NFL uses it, the NBA uses it, heart patients use it. It's very easy to consider yourself a meditator and not be too alternative-minded.

- Laura Dern

I always fall in love with qualities of people I work with.

- Laura Dern

Unfortunately, overall, movies are a conglomerate. People buy and sell people in this business, which can get really ugly.

- Laura Dern

I was raised by two actors in a moment in time - the Seventies - when there was no judgment of characters, no heroes and bad guys.

- Laura Dern

I wanted to go to Jupiter. That was my plan from day one, and David Lynch gave me the ticket.

- Laura Dern

Sometimes my family got me in the door. Somebody would say, 'Bruce Dern's daughter - sure I'd like to meet her.' It was a point of interest. But after five minutes of talking about my father, I still had to read for the part.

- Laura Dern

I don't think you have to be in these serious, heavy, independent little movies to be an actor. Some of the most interesting acting I've seen is on cable television.

- Laura Dern

There's always a side of a woman that likes a man from the other side of the tracks.

- Laura Dern

I was raised by an actress, and I watched all those women turn 60 and ask, Shouldn't get face work? My mother and Anne Bancroft said, We're not going to fall into that.

- Laura Dern

Everything's cyclical. Having been raised by actors, I watched their careers, and the challenge is to take time off.

- Laura Dern

I think there are ways to get so caught up in your career and being so heavy and dramatic, and everyone wants to be a tortured genius.

- Laura Dern

When you're playing someone who has a strong ego about themselves, you can't play them when you have the opposite opinion of the one they have of themselves.

- Laura Dern

I'm a natural blonde. I was a towhead as a kid, and then it got ashier when I was 18.

- Laura Dern

To stay true to your art is such a complicated journey, and Dad clearly has done it.

- Laura Dern

I will be working with David Lynch when I'm 80.

- Laura Dern

You must always watch when David Lynch makes anything.

- Laura Dern

I got picked for very unique and independent filmmaking experiences with auteurs. And I'm so lucky.

- Laura Dern

My mother is extremely interested in everything esoteric.

- Laura Dern

When man decides he can control nature, he's in deep trouble.

- Laura Dern

It's really fun to act like a bimbo. But it's fun to act like a bimbo only when people know that you really aren't one.

- Laura Dern

'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington' is one of the greatest films of all time.

- Laura Dern

Diet is weird. It's elusive. I just try to listen to my body.

- Laura Dern

A lot of people have asked whether acting is in my genes. I don't know if anyone is born to act. And it certainly wasn't pushed on me. It was something I wanted to do.

- Laura Dern

My dad taught me to never be pigeonholed; to really allow yourself to reinvent characters as they reinvent you; to be bold and to be willing to play seemingly unlikeable people.

- Laura Dern

I resent ever being stereotyped.

- Laura Dern

Whatever character you play, it gives you the chance to expose another side of yourself that maybe you've never felt comfortable with, or never knew about.

- Laura Dern

What do you say when someone has truly inspired you? How do you express to an artist how deeply their work has affected you?

- Laura Dern

There's something so accessible about heroes who have faults.

- Laura Dern

My favorite books are psychology, self-help, and I'm fascinated by Jung, by dream work.

- Laura Dern

I knew I wanted to become an actor when I was 7 years old. My dad was working with Alfred Hitchcock, my mom was working with Martin Scorsese - and it was the great summer of my childhood.

- Laura Dern

All kids are selfish. I wanted to do homework and do my thing and call my agent. My mother's needs weren't in my mind at that moment.

- Laura Dern

I don't turn my nose up at anything. If it's a great part, it's a great part. I'd love to do a box-office hit.

- Laura Dern

Jealousy is a scary thing.

- Laura Dern

The bad news is, I have worked less than I have liked. The good news is, I can look back on my body of work and feel truly proud of the work I have done.

- Laura Dern

If I had different parents who were in it for the money, I might have a different perspective. But they really are artists; they intelligently approach each character and prepare in every sense of the word. I grew up in a world that had great discipline.

- Laura Dern

I'm lucky enough that directors sometimes seek me out for little projects that people don't even know about, that just surface later on.

- Laura Dern

I've always loved film more than theater.

- Laura Dern

That's life - to turn each other on, to feel good, to feel in love.

- Laura Dern

For people who feel things in an enormous way, it's pretty hard to live in this world.

- Laura Dern

It would be great to make a movie that had the style of a great '30's film.

- Laura Dern

Being an actress my whole life, it feels so good to have a clean face when I'm off, so I'm not a big makeup wearer.

- Laura Dern

As an actor, you're not kind of thinking about your own work or watching the movie for the first time.

- Laura Dern

I always wondered what it would be like to have a normal childhood.

- Laura Dern

It's always been a desire of mine to work with my parents.

- Laura Dern

It's one thing to have forced time off as an actor, and another thing when you actually say, 'I don't want to read anything, and I don't want to talk to anybody.'

- Laura Dern

When you become a parent, you really care that you get that right, and you care about nothing else.

- Laura Dern

Love means a lot to me, and I love loving, and I love boys.

- Laura Dern