Natasha Lyonne Quotations

I would have done well as a gypsy child, I think. A circus baby. I coulda played a great street urchin or ragamuffin. Or just been one. I certainly liked entertaining people and making jokes, but I don't know necessarily if that's what your child is prone to that you should necessarily put them in a real working industry at six years old.

As wild as I was, when the cops show up, and suddenly you're being handcuffed, it's so deeply shocking and terrifying, the loss of freedom.

The thing about curly hair is that it's a toss-up. Some days you can let it air dry and it's better than a hair-do, but some days you just look like a sloppy person. I'm really resistant to a trim. I only do it when it gets hard to brush out in the shower, then I'll submit, begrudgingly.

I always see the absurdity in most situations. It's my experience of how life works.

It's a wild thing, that people have the ability to help each other by just relating to one another.

I started wearing all black around the time I got into Nirvana. I first heard 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' when I was about 12, and I remember jumping on my bed, so excited about it.

My family moved to Israel when I was eight until I was 10, and then we came back, and my parents split up. I was suddenly in a single-parent home and on scholarship. Fifth grade was such a hard year for me.

Rather than spend so much time wondering if I'm going to get hired, or is it a problem that I've got this black-tar history, I've just got to keep doing what I'm doing and try to be decent.

I adore Eddie Kaye Thomas and Jason Biggs. Eddie was the only one who called me when they were doing 'American Reunion' and told me, 'You need to do this.'

I have a deep compassion for the idea that it's okay to be myself. The idea that anything 'other' is bad and wrong and broken is so wildly off base.

The aging process is totally minimizing. Life in general is pretty minimizing because you have a lot of big ideas, and you have to battle the mistaken delusions and instability that come with youth.

I learned that if you're going to be a troublemaker, you don't want a ton of witnesses, because there's inevitable fallout from living like you're in 'Lord of the Flies.'

My hair is such a statement that it's like a neon sign asking for trouble.

I have a lot of friends who are trying to clean up their act, or that are still making trouble for themselves, so I'm definitely well-versed on what goes on in the mind and the heart of a person who self-destructs as their coping mechanism, and also what they're like when you take their preferred substance away.

I have a theory that self-made, first-generation actresses don't feel entitled to success.

I'm somebody who believes in funny things, and laughing, but I do like for them to come from a place that addresses the human condition.

Life is a wildly transient thing with people coming into your life and dropping away. It definitely takes work to maintain relationships.

Anormal day looks like, you know, shower, put on the same jeans, the same tattered Gucci loafers I got at the thrift store, white socks, and my t-shirt and my very beat-up Helmut Lang blazer. Im in the exact same outfit every day.

I feel like I just have such the blood and bones of a New Yorker that I can almost imagine better, like, giving up the fight and not being able to afford the city and going out West, keeping a small place here, and then when I'm like 80, coming back here, living on the park and going to the theater.

That's usually how I get to know strangers - get inappropriately touchy. Once they've experienced the awkwardness of you being way too close for comfort, after that, it all gets easy.

Beauty was never really my trip. Maybe those roles are attracted to me?

I don't really feel like I need to be a teenager ever again.

It's not easy trying to navigate your internal world in the public eye.

There's something great about all your worst fears coming true and being said about you. There's a tremendous liberation on some level.

From the first instant I met her, I wanted to be Nora Ephron. I just really wanted to please her.

I have to say, I'm still surprised anyone's nice to me, that anyone talks to me. But I think people understand that other people go through things. We're all a bit gonzo, and you're allowed to take a little time to get your head on straight.

I do have an outsider's complex of getting made fun of. I was made fun of as a kid, and I don't have the stomach for it.

As a woman, I've learned that having a uniform of your staples or setting your look and saying what distinguishes you - like red lips or hair or whatever - leaves so much time for the rest of the day.

As a New Yorker, or wherever I am, I just want to know I can get our of the house in five minutes if I have to and not have to spend a bunch of time obsessing in the mirror, trying on a million different options. Now, I just know what works.

The world at large doesn't always make sense to me, and there are safe havens. Linda Manz in 'Out of the Blue' is one of them.

I would love to option 'Crying of Lot 49 and turn it into a movie.

Let's face it. I'm an open book.

I have a pretty fancy facialist, this woman Dale Breault. Getting older, it's a good thing to have a serious facialist.

I grew up in Manhattan, and I've always had all kinds of people around me. I've always had a very 'live and let live' point of view.

I was this kid who had been raised in New York, and now all of a sudden, my mother decided that she was a Jewish divorcee and therefore she should be living in Miami Beach.

You compare yourself to somebody who you think is a peer, and you can totally lose the plot, and not understand that you are nothing like them in the first place, and it was never you versus anybody.

When I was a young person working, everybody was older than me, so I had to kind of keep up. I'd see every movie and listen to everything played, and read all the relevant books. Being an actor, it's kind of your job to know what came before you and how big your feelings are allowed to be.

Your trade becomes very much impacted by the quality of your life experiences and your capacity to process them.

There are beauty icons that I can never be like, sorta like a Gena Rowlands - I'll never have that look. I love Giulietta Masina, the great Fellini actress. But I'm probably more Seymour Cassel. Or somewhere between Lou Reed and Nora Ephron?

If I was a bajillionaire, I would spend a lot of time at Barneys just buying all kinds of great things all the time. I would have so many black cashmeres it would be out of control. I like the way nice things feel very much.

Over time, you realize that even the things that are most high stakes kind of resolve themselves.

It's such a weird thing: to sit and look at yourself is so distracting to the psyche. It would be like me standing in front of a mirror and looking at myself all day, trying to find a flaw.

What I like to do is to give my real name in Starbucks but be really hostile each time, as if they're asking me something that I've never heard in my life. I give them a really dirty look, "Really? It's Natasha. Okay?" Like I've never been to Starbucks before. Each time. I enter the premises looking for combat.

I will take the subway and look at certain women and think 'God, that woman's story will never be told. How come that lady doesn't get a movie about her?'

There's a great Albert Camus quote: 'The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.' When I first re-emerged, I was embarrassed to walk down the street. People would come up and say, 'I heard you were dead!' But I had to remind myself that a lot of the stuff I went through was pretty brutal. I'm definitely thankful that some of the rough patches are behind me.

I am a hooker with a heart of gold.

There are epic downsides to living a somewhat public life. The upshot of that is there's nothing to hide. It's a relief in a way. There's nothing about me that can't be said.

I'm not to be confused with Natasha Henstridge in 'Species,' where I just emerge out of the weird alien womb looking amazing. I really rely heavily on my black outfits and my gold chains to give me sort of a thing.

As a rule people don't think other people on drugs are funny. They think they are tragic. They have a point, but I still had the funny.

I'm really enjoying growing up. I feel like so much of my life was in an existential crisis when I was young, and I don't feel as bogged down by that anymore.

There's that special magical place that exists when you forget everything else because you are laughing hysterically. It's the only truly safe place and it can happen with a stranger or a best friend.

I'd love to go to school, but every time I try I get a movie. That's actually how I get work: I enroll. That's like my good luck charm.

I'm not someone who went to acting school - I was just out of the gate, doing it.

No, but it is something I really enjoy speaking about. You've got to do something with all the books you've read, so you might as well imagine you've optioned them.

I'm a movie star. Can I talk to my entertainment lawyer?

Sometimes the things that come out of my mouth are mortifying.

I have a television, but it's not connected to anything. I watch everything on my computer.

I often think my boyfriend is going to leave me just from seeing how I talk to the dog. But you know, when you are talking to your dog, you are accessing this softer side of you. Everything else melts away.

My car is always black. I really struggle with red cars. I don't want to attract too much cop attention.

The person sending ironic text messages has no idea that their voice does not sound so great in text. There's no dry sense of humor in a text. It comes off as a little bit shitty.

Existence itself is disconcerting and disorienting.

I'm a text artist. It's an unsung art form because it's so ahead of its time.

In my experience of living, for a time, in the underbelly of society, I spent a lot of time in various holding cells.

I just never get into trouble. It's not my thing.

I definitely would rather take a nap than get angry.

The interesting trick of comedy, in a lot of ways, is to have both the comedy and the grounding of the real thing. You get a real sense of a human being.

Life is not for the faint of heart.

Remember when we didn't live in the future? When we were young, it was not the future yet.

You've got to do something with all the books you've read, so you might as well imagine you've optioned them.