Ellen Burstyn

“It's about avoiding reality through various escape routes that become addictions and lead to Hell. My character is addicted to television, chocolate, coffee, to her dream of her son, which has no basis in reality.”

“It's been awhile. My Oscar is getting kind of tarnished. I looked at it a couple of years ago and thought I really needed a new one.”

“My mother was very glamorous. She was very beautiful, and she had a lot of friends; she was fun and loved to drink.”

“Directors tend to kind of let me do what I want to do.”

“When I was 19, I took a train from Houston to New York, and I had in my lap the collected works of William Shakespeare. The play I read on that journey was 'Titus Andronicus.'”

“The only Shakespeare I ever did was a production of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' two years in a row in my garden in Rockland County on the Hudson River in the 1980s. I had all the actors from the Actors Studio come out, and we made our own costumes.”

“I've liked all the directors I've worked with a lot. And the ones I like best are the ones that have really good taste about what take was best.”

“When we did 'The Last Picture Show,' the whole cast was unknowns, and we all got careers from it. Well, I don't think this could be done now.”

“I'm interested in the cosmos. I want to know what's out there and how connected we are.”

“I left my career in Hollywood, moved back to New York, and went to Lee Strasberg and studied with him for the rest of his life.”

“It's a sin to have your films not to make money.”

“With all the awards I've won, you'd think that I'd at least be able to make a living. It's a really terrible situation.”

“I always wanted to play Joan of Arc. I've always wanted to do that. Now I'm thinking, 'Maybe there's a story in Joan of Arc's mother!' If I don't hurry up, her grandmother!”

“The interesting thing about doing a play is to find a way to make it fresh and do it as though you were doing it for the first time.”

“They pulled Resurrection out of the theatres, so it was running in New York and I was nominated for the Oscar and there was no ad in the newspapers to say it was running. So it was literally killed.”

“Well my taste wasn't very good when I first started out. But later, when I began to appreciate the art of acting, I would say the actress I most admire is Vanessa Redgrave.”

“There was no such thing as child abuse. Parents owned their children. They could do whatever they wanted.”

“I eat healthily and exercise, and I'm not giving up and saying I'm too old - I'm just determined to keep on marching with enthusiasm and interest and curiosity.”

“I feel eager to learn as much as I can, not only about my craft but the world and the cosmos and how we got here and whether there's any purpose to our being here.”

“I sketched out a rough story for them and the director said, well it's a good story but we have the go-ahead from Universal to make this script and did I want to do it. I said no, and they left.”