Maggie Gyllenhaal Quotes

• "A big part of being an actress specifically is feeling entitled to your artistic opinion, feeling that it means something, and being able to stand by it."
• "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."
• "Acting is really important to me, so I think it would be really hard for me to do something I didn't believe in."
• "Donnie Darko was sort of like a fluke. It was like, Oh sure, yeah, I'll play your older sister. I mean I am your older sister."
• "Having an education is invaluable."
• "I don't see that many movies lately that are actually about something, that are trying to challenge something about the way that people interact."
• "I feel so gratified about having finished college. I learned how to articulate myself. It gave me confidence more than anything. And also the ability to analyze the text."
• "I feel there is no shortage of real interesting women's roles. But I found them and did all of them just now."
• "I have a couple of girlfriends who are like, healing. We take care of each other. They know when I need to be taken care of."
• "I just worked with Julianne Moore, who I think includes her sexuality in everything she does, and is naked a lot and is in her 40s, or Diane Lane, they're both older actresses-who are super sexy."
• "I liked that idea. Someone who's trying to perform herself and not succeeding."
• "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."
• "I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn't a religion major really."
• "I think most human beings, even if you're in a situation that's constricting or complicated or hard, they try to survive."
• "I think S&M in the movie is in a lot of ways a metaphor for the complications in life, the fact that there is both light and dark in every relationship and in every person. And that pain helps to define what pleasure is."
• "I think Secretary's funny, it is about sex, and there's a lot of sex in it, sex is the key, but you're talking about a lot of other complicated things."
• "I think sex is very interesting for most people, but I'm interested in sex as a way of communication, I'm not that interested in the fantasy version of a sex scene."
• "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 would like to do a big movie that many, many people see but I just know I would be miserable if it didn't have something to it."
• "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."
• "I'm playing somebody who is a recovering drug addict who got out of prison. It takes place in 2 weeks-the 1st 2 weeks I'm out of prison."
• "I'm pretty good at indulging myself. I'm about to go travel for a week. I like to get massaged, go into steam rooms. I take care of myself."
• "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."
• "It's not like I'm only compelled to tell stories about sex!"
• "Most people are interested in seeing 27-year-old women who are in movies somehow connected to sex. It's interesting to everyone. Especially little movies that are having trouble getting made, there's always sex."
• "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."
• "Someone who's 26, 27, has a very different relationship to sex than someone who's 30."
• "Ten years ago, it was really difficult for a young actress to walk onto a set and disagree with the director and having that be OK and have a conversation about it and everyone be cool with 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."
• "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."
• "Things like the spanking scene with James Spader, I felt so protected and I was really trusting of James. So I felt excited and curious the way my character felt."
• "We were lounging around in this beautiful house in LA, and I'm coming from NY, so sometimes when we weren't working I would just sit on those folding chairs."
• "Who can I trust? You have to invest in somebody and chances are you're probably going to invest in somebody who's going to deceive you. I've been conned a couple of times, but now I'm a little more savvy."
• "You have a right to your opinion about the work that you're doing. An artist is as equally important as the director. If you believe that, you can work in any circumstances."
• "You're not going to do good work if you're not choosing something because it inspires you."