Susan Sarandon Quotations

I look forward to being older, when what you look like becomes less and less an issue and what you are is the point.

Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know, what did Iraq do to us?

When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.

To know that once you decide to look at life outside of the narrow limits of just your world and start to understand that you can make a difference in very simple ways - in volunteering and all the way up to bigger world problems.

It will be great when it's not such a big deal when a woman gets a good job.

I feel my family's needs are a priority. I'm not comfortable with the idea of serving the many and ignoring my family.

Making love is like hitting a baseball. You just gotta relax and concentrate.

I'm tired of being labelled anti-American because I ask questions.

I try to live my life every day in the present, and try not to turn a blind eye to injustice and need.

I think I'm an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist.

The only thing I can talk about is just forgiving yourself, because I do not have everything together. And so I tell people: No, you should see my house, it's a mess.

Everyone has a responsibility towards this larger family of man, but especially if you're privileged, that increases your responsibility.

Just because I haven't yet had any project surgery, I'm not going to knock it, because I think women have the right to do whatever they want to their bodies that make them feel good about themselves.

So I would hope they would develop some kind of habit that involves understanding that their life is so full they can afford to give in all kinds of ways to other people. I consider that to be baseline spirituality.

We stand a chance of getting a president who has probably killed more people before he gets into office than any president in the history of the United States.

I was told I had an overabundance of original sin.

It's still not easy to find roles that offer more complex images of women.

I think sometimes what happens is that all of this feeling out of control manifests itself in trying to control your body; whether it's an eating disorder or talking about getting your nose fixed, as if that's going to be the solution to all the pressure.

It is a different world than when I was growing up, and you started to just kind of maintain at thirty-five and just hope you can hope it together. People are a lot more vital than I am and doing all kinds of things and leading really important movements.

Now, Tim has been really, really busy, and it's been my job now to kind of deal with everything. And trying to figure out how we balance that, logistically it's a nightmare. But these little jobs make it much easier.

The only time I've really been away from my kids to do work was doing Shall We Dance because they both were in camp and it was the first time in twenty years that I haven't been with my kids.

When I tell people I'm a comedian they say, 'Oh, are you funny?' I say, 'No, it's not that kind of comedy.'

I'm a native New Yorker. Everything to do with New York feels like my family.

Moses? That's a very humble beginning. I'm so happy for them, the more the merrier. I know she takes mothering very seriously and it is one of the hardest things you can possibly do and it will take every ounce of imagination that she has. I'm so happy for her because that little Apple deserves a playmate.

If we're not here, we're saying what happened is acceptable and normal and I think that does a disservice to other police, ... We Shall Overcome.

I am so honored and thrilled, ... Being from New York it's great to have ... a little bit of real estate in L.A. when I am here.

But it was scary because when I met with Cameron, we were both sniffing around each other trying to decide what the tone would be. I didn't want to do Lucy and Desi ... I knew where the traps were. I was nervous about making it spontaneous and awkward, but at the same time giving it a kind of dignity.

I loved doing that long scene. It was a really challenging set piece.

I feel very strongly that if something happens to another mother's kid that it happens to my kid.

Under pressure, she embraced her personal struggles with dignity and humor and always with the focus on the greater good.

It became a tool that started so much dialogue. We never guessed that it would be so big.

I think that parents are supposed to be sexual. Anybody's parents. Even kissing your mate, to kids it's like they don't even want to go there.

You guys ask really long questions. In the U.S., they just want to know who you're sleeping with.

Don't roll over on this one. This is really a big deal.

Do you really have to be the ice queen intellectual or the slut whore? Isn't there some way to be both?

Your loss will be met with a hurricane of love!

It's awesome to me because there are more and more kids getting involved.

It's so different from the States where they just want to know who you're sleeping with,

I want to do anything I can, he has been kind of shut out by the powers that be in terms of having of a voice.

That scene was a selling point to do the movie,

I haven't done anything they way you're supposed to because I always saw my career as a means to an end.

I never think about humiliating myself. I keep focusing on wanting to do a good job.

In the U.S., they just want to know who you're sleeping with.

It's a very exciting time in the history of this country, to even see people responding to a different way of doing business and really wanting to make a change.

I always think that the difference between film and theater is like the difference between masturbation and making love. Because, in film, you just have to get one moment right; you're practically by yourself. And in theater, you actually have to have a relationship with the audience.

Sometimes what happens is that, when you micromanage actors and moments, it just doesn't quite live.

If Wes Anderson has a very strong cast, he can direct the minutia of that story and still manage to have something that lives and breathes.

It's a miracle when something actually turns out well because there are so many ways for it to go wrong.

There wasn't space to mood-up. I think Rose Byrne was just extraordinary. Talk about a character that could be really unsympathetic at times. She just jumped in these scenes that go from anger to hysteria to crying to laughing and back to anger. I just marveled.

This Catholic thing, I think what it does is it makes a place for mystery in a person. And even when the faith goes away, there's that space where you crave something bigger than yourself. For me, that's kind of where art came in, after that.

My aunt had given me these rosary beads that were glow-in-the-dark. So all of a sudden I look down and they're glowing, and I'm looking toward the door and thinking, "Oh, my God, I don't want anything to come though here. I'm not worthy, I'm not ready." I didn't want to be one of those kids who sees Our Lady of Fatima.

One night I looked down and my rosary beads were glowing. And I realized that I did not want to see the blessed Virgin - I was terrified.

When I grew up in the church, we were praying because the Communists were going to come over and hang you upside down on a cross, and I so wanted to be a good person, and I had these rosary beads that I would sleep with every night, and I just wanted the blessed Virgin to be on my side.

It didn't seem to have relevance, except in Central America or South America, countries where the church was connected to the fight of the people for economic justice. That's why it was so interesting to find myself back with Sister Helen [in Dead Man Walking], this new breed of nuns who were making a difference in the community.

By the time I went to the Catholic University of America, which was the time the priests were all leaving with the nuns, the more I studied about the Bible and how it came about, the more I lost my faith.

You just can never count on a formula, on a movie that you think is going to be a big hit, and that's why you do it. You have to choose each one for what you think you'll learn and the fun you'll have. And maybe the cool people that you work with or a character that you're going to be able to explore ... You just keep your fingers crossed.

There have been a few little films I'd done like that that the studio just decided not to do much with, films like Anywhere but Here [1999] or Jeff, Who Lives at Home [2012]. Thank God people find them later and love them. I'm always really drawn to people who have seen these strange little films.

I did study drama at Catholic U, but the undergraduates weren't put in productions, really, except as extras, and it wasn't a hands-on kind of thing at all. I couldn't afford to go to another college. And my grandparents lived in D.C., so I was able to live with them, and that's how I was able to afford it at all.

The directors I consider really great have the ability to recognize when something's going in an unexpected direction and see it as a bonus and be able to go with it, as opposed to locking down what they thought was going to happen.

I'm kind of a nerd, so whenever I get a chance to talk to an artist I really admire, I tend to gravitate to process.

I got married to Chris Sarandon, who was a graduate student, and he knew everything at that point, I thought, because he was older. He introduced me to poetry and black-and-white movies.

I married him [Chris Sarandon] my senior year, and after I graduated, he went to the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, and I tagged along and was doing some local modeling and commercials and things like that. A woman named Jane Oliver, who handled Sylvester Stallone, saw Chris at the theater and asked him to come in and audition. We went in and auditioned - he needed someone to read with him. I read with him, and she said, "Well, why don't both of you come back in the fall."

I've just come back from Vegas, and I was in on the caucus process. It's insane. What a mess. And also with these particular candidates who are running, so many times I said, "I just wish Kurt [Vonnegut] were alive." This is like something he would be writing. This is just crazy stuff. I would love to hear his take on it.

I've read some of Kurt Vonnegut letters from when he was young. He was a prisoner of war, and even when he was in his early twenties, there were things mentioned that showed up in his novels. One of the sweetest things in those letters was him wanting to be a writer but doubting himself, not having confidence in himself.

Kurt Vonnegut wasn't a chatty guy, but when he spoke, it was always clear and very funny, in the way that he wrote, in a very specific kind of combination of word groupings and expressions that lived somewhere else.

We were friends with Jonathan Demme. We were all down on the West Side of New York, and I think I met Kurt [Vonnegut] through Edith [Demme]. And then I was lucky to do Who Am I This Time? [1982], which was an adaptation of his short story that Jonathan Demme directed with Chris Walken and I, and that really cemented the friendship.

Theater for me is terrifying but much more rewarding, because you know what they're seeing. Film is all little bits and pieces. And you can do an amazing job, but if the camera isn't getting it, it doesn't work. And then other times when you feel you really weren't present, and then you see it and somehow it works. So there's a mystery, there's a strange collaboration that takes place with everybody.

I had school debt I had to pay off. Sometimes I would do commercials to get me through. And so I kept bumping along like that and learning different things. I knew I wanted to get out on my own. I was just super-curious, and I was a good listener. And that got me through.

I'd have conversations with the camera crew about what was going on in the scene, so that they were prepared to shoot it. I love the fact that when you work, you create this tribe.

You create this situation where you are so dependent on each other. That's especially true for film. In theater, the actor has much more say, much more control, for better or worse.

Acting is kind of a forced compassion, where you learn that given certain circumstances, you can feel and do things that you never thought yourself capable of. And so it stops you from being super-judgmental.

If you always have to be watching yourself and judging, I don't think you're as free.

Somebody can be the captain of the ship, which allows you to make big mistakes.

I don't like to plan. Very often, for me, acting is like loving; it's using the muscle that you use in loving, in that your heart feels open. Physically, you feel open. And so therefore your job is to enter, open, and listen. And see what happens.

Really, for me, it's important to know who's pitching and who's catching - just what that scene is supposed to accomplish in terms of storytelling. That being said, on the day, basically what you're trying to get yourself into an open place. And if the character is in a state of anxiety or vulnerability, you try to find some touchstone.

New York is very user-friendly if you don't want to be in a car all the time. It can also provide you with surprises because it's so compressed - if you walk around, you just find things.

I think looking at your own life, on- and offscreen, you can motivate anything, or you can delude yourself into anything.

In the theater, you're so much more in charge as an actor. For better or for worse, you know what the audience is seeing. But you can be acting your socks off on film, and then you see the movie, and the camera is on the other actor, or they've cut out the lines you thought were significant, or they've adjusted the plot. So much of it is out of your control.

It's really hard to find stuff that is original. You pick up scripts and in four pages you know where it's going and the same thing when you are sitting in a theatre, I just rejoice when something unfolds in a way that I'm not conducive...

I'll always rather be in a ship that's got a captain that has some vision.

It never really worked for me to have long arguments about motivation.

It helps me chill out and focus.

My intent is to speak on behalf of those whose voices are less readily heard - children and women at risk

Like most parents in the US, they are trying, with a little help from UNICEF, to do the best they can to help their children reach their full potential...

I can't speak for other people, but for me, it never really worked to think something like, "What Beatle did she like in high school?" or those kinds of elaborate backstories.

Knowledge is the key to stopping the spread of AIDS. Yet millions of children are missing an education. Missing their teachers who have died of the disease. Missing from class as they stay home to care for their dying mothers and fathers. Children are missing your support. United for Children. Unite against AIDS.

When you run into someone in NY it is usually a pleasant surprise. When you run into someone in LA you usually had a car accident.

Sometimes when you have to go into something, unless you're gifted and can just turn it on and off like a jukebox, you find someplace where there's nothing going on to get yourself into whatever state your character is entering into.

With the help of folks like you and me, Heifer International tackles the problem of hunger one family at a time with gifts of renewable resources - farm animals that are ongoing sources of food and income.

I'm happy to be considered desirable. I love it!

I hope they're present in their lives and feel some kind of empathy. I think a lot of the mistakes that have been made in the world have been through a lack of empathy. If you can identify with someone else and empathise with someone else, then activism is a short step away, she explained in an interview with Parade.

That's one of my little expressions. I never really studied acting so I kind of kiddingly talk about "building your circle" and "mooding up," because I really didn't learn any technique.

Never root for a team whose uniforms have elastic stretch waistbands.

I've tried them all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball.

Now, as I move through my fifties, I can be professional and domestic, creative and intellectual, patient and urgent. I have learned that we should never settle for someone else's definition of who we can be. Growing to this age, I realize, is kind of like feeling your voice deepen. It's still your voice, but it has more substance, and it sounds like it knows its own origins.

I've always had a really developed sense of justice. As a child, I would rotate my dolls' dresses for fear that they might come alive at midnight and one of them would always have the best dress on. Whatever it was that made me worry about my dolls I suppose has paid off in my career because, really, an actor is all about empathy and imagination. And those are the cornerstones of activism.

I feel it's easier to sit in the backseat and go, "Oh, yeah, let's go there." You're not worried about getting to the destination. But the guy or the woman who has to get you to the destination is worried about a lot of other things, so my job as an actor is to try as many things as possible, be as open as possible, listen, and keep my heart open.

In the U.S., they just want to know who you're sleeping with.

What I like about The Meddler style of movie is that it's a fairly lighthearted romantic comedy, but there are hidden moments where something happens that's unexpected, that hopefully have some kind of emotional resonance that you didn't see coming. I love when a film does that.

I think you have to ask yourself, what is the point of the script? What is the script selling? Because all scripts are political, every story is political. It either challenges or reinforces some schism or stereotype. So what is the project going to say at the end of the day? What does it tell you about the world, or what does it challenge in terms of your world?