Camryn Manheim

“In my fantasies, I always wanted to play the ingenue, but in reality, in my bones, I am so used to playing the grandmother that I don't feel safe or even sure that I can do it.”

“I've always thought of fat as just a descriptive word.”

“Being exposed to those beauty queens and Praying Mantises at the same time made me ask myself some hard questions. Would I have been so radical had I not been so fat? Could I have been one of the women on the other side parading my beauty of which I was so proud? As I stood there holding my JUDGE MEAT NOT WOMEN picket sign, I recalled all the people who had said to me throughout my life, "You've got such a pretty face." But they never finished the thought. The whole phrase is "You've got such a pretty face, too bad you're fat." But what if I weren't fat? Would I still have attacked this "Meat Parade" so fiercely? The truth is, my fat has informed my politics. And while I'd like to think I would have been just as ardent in my opposition to the objectification of women had I been thin, I'll never know for sure.”

“I think Ellenor is embarrassed and ashamed and has devoted all of her energy to the law and to helping other people get justice because it's too difficult for her to face her own struggle for justice.”

“I was scared, because I knew that in the political arena, you have to satisfy so many different types of people at once, and I wasn't sure that I could speak for everybody and be politically correct.”

“For a long time, I really struggled with the idea of being an actor because I really felt that I should be in the Peace Corps.”

“I hate overweight, because it implies that there's a weight standard I should be adhering to.”

“I learned how to sign because when I was growing up in California in order to get into college you needed two semesters of language to get into a University of California school.”

“My parents have always been offended by my weight, embarrassed maybe. It didn't fit with their sensibilities.”

“It never occurred to me that I'd be on a television show or in feature films but when those came into play my dreams changed along the way.”

“One of my earliest memories is of my father carrying me in one arm with a picket sign in the other.”

“Parents know how to push your buttons because, hey, they sewed them on.”

“I have lived my life in a culture that hates fat people.”

“Nobody else knew what to do with me because big women are old.”

“Years ago women of my size were considered royalty.”

“The character I play is a wonderful compilation of things I hate about myself and things I love about myself and things that I've invented to make her even more interesting than me.”

“So instead of beating myself up for being fat, I think it's a miracle that I laugh every day and walk through my life with pride, because our culture is unrelenting when it comes to large people.”

“Both of my parents are professors and everyone in my family has some fabulous degree of something or another and I couldn't get into college because I didn't know a language.”

“One of the things I did when I was in New York, which has a wonderful deaf community, is I have worked on making Broadway more accessible to deaf people.”

“It's okay to be a fat man. It's prestige and power and all of that. But fat women are seen as just lazy and stupid and having no self-control.”