Mariette Hartley

“Tom Brokaw has friends who are actors, and yet he feels that, as bright as they are, they are not articulate. So he said how astonished he was that Sidney Poitier, with whom he'd just taped an interview, had been so articulate.”

“One of the wonderful things about Shakespeare is that he trusted an audience to move quickly with him. One moment tragedy, the next comedy.”

“My career was one mistake after another. I was working a lot, but nothing was building, it wan't going toward anything.”

“It's an extraordinary experience to encounter the two kinds of deaths of my parents, one violent and jagged, it hits you like a tornado, the other, gentle with grace and dignity.”

“I've been in front of the camera the last 20 years, and it's just become a friend.”

“My father was a farm boy who never learned to be holding and supportive.”

“My household, as I was growing up, was a house of hidden shame.”

“My family is really a classy 'Simpsons.'”

“The casting-couch routine has been going on for ages, from top directors to the lowliest agents. I had to attend a meeting where four actresses filed complaints against the same person over his moral conduct. It's not a funny situation.”

“My greatest strength as a person? I guess I get caught in it a lot, but I think it's my ability to put myself in someone else's shoes.”

“I was very much a character actress. But I've never stopped doing theater.”

“NBC President Fred Silverman told me he would change my life, and proceeded to offer me a five to seven-year contract to replace Jane Pauley as co-host of 'The Today Show.'”

“I love comedy. That's what I really look forward to doing. Enough of this heavy drama.”

“My mother's father was the behavioral psychologist, John B. Watson.”

“Nobody knew I could do comedy until I started Polaroid.”

“It's hard to be a long-distance mother.”

“I always tell kids, in high school or acting students, to do something else around acting, or not around it, just in your life that is of service.”

“Bipolar disorder is something that is mine. And it is very difficult to talk about it.”

“I've never had a homosexual or bisexual experience, but it doesn't make me uncomfortable to dip into those feelings. I think a lot of women have those feelings without acting on them.”

“I'm always in Jamaica in my fantasies. We have a home there, and it's my special spiritual place where I get re-nourished.”