Kathy Bates quotes: lil’ Ms. Misery’s most shared quotes.
“A heart can only discover what it really wants with experience.”
“Chance favors the prepared mind.”
“You do it because you love it and you really get into it. And if you turn around and notice that somebody’s watching, the whole event changes. Things move and things change. If you walk down to the river, what you see is a river—there it is. If you put a bucket in it, and pull the water out, the water in the bucket is not the river anymore.”
“We all drive to do what we want to do because we want to make things better.”
“Learning from other people is much more important.”
“You’ve gotta have the manure, you’ve got to take all the sh*t to really grow.”
“Telling each other our stories is a more effective way of living on this planet together.”
“I have really focused on mindfulness. That helps me make better choices both physically, psychologically, and emotionally.”
“All alone or not, you got to walk ahead. Thing to remember is, if we’re all alone, then we’re all together in that too.”
“My inner strength comes from my friends. I have a very close group of friends and family, and we all help each other through our dark times.”
“I find it safer to pursue the powerful, the ugly, the unpleasant.”
“We all love to hear a good story. We save our stories in books. We save our books in libraries. Libraries are the storyhouses full of all those stories and secrets.”
“I didn’t go out on one date in high school. I played guitar and sang and wrote my own music and poetry and stuff when I was a teenager.”
“I want to be defined by my own essence.”
“I’m too young to be old and too old to be young.”
“I pay taxes. I’m an American citizen. I have freedom of speech, so I think I need to just step up and say what I feel before I get too much older.”
“It seems like women are always in the kitchen around food and they’re serving and they’re giving and they’re enjoying and it’s part of the plentitude of life and the enrichment of life.”
“I’ve always tried to be honest, and it would be too difficult for me to develop some kind of persona. I don’t have enough time or energy for that.”
“I didn’t want to have cancer… and I really don’t want to have lymphedema. The fallout was devastating. I was bitter, I was depressed. I thought my career was over. I thought, ‘There’s no way, I’m done, everything is done.’ I am now cancer-free, but the lymphedema lingers. And the condition can make easy things difficult. But I feel blessed to have the condition because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be in a position to use my celebrity to do something that can maybe help people.”
“From the very beginning I knew acting was what I wanted to do, I just didn’t know if I could really do it as a profession. I was able to study it at the Southern Methodist University and get terrific training there. And I loved the 15 years I spent in New York, working on stage on Broadway and off. But all the time I kept thinking, ‘Oh, what good is this? It’s self-aggrandizing—what am I really doing?’ I’ve always struggled with self-doubt. When I was starting out in this business, a friend of mine said, ‘You have to have a head like a bullet and heart like a baby.’ That’s my motto. It’s hard to do, you have to let things go, and do your best—but it’s out of your control.”
“The bottom line is that I’m an actor, so when somebody pitches me a great part, it’s a no-brainer. You never know what it’s gonna be like, in terms of the actual experience. You can be really excited about a part that can turn out sh*tty, you can have a bad time, there’s a bad egg or two or three, in the bunch, or the producers are weird, or something like that.”
“It matters to me, acting. It’s what I do. It’s what I’ve given up a lot to do. It’s my life source. And I guess I’m too serious about it sometimes, but I want to treat it right.”
“I look for a role that hopefully I feel empathy with and that I can understand and love, but also that has that challenge for me to play: a different kind of role, a different type of character, a different time period.”
“And people are always saying: ‘Well, you go to Hollywood and you get yourself a film career or a TV series, and then you can do anything you want. Because then you’ve got the clout.’ That had always sounded like a lot of hooey to me, but now I think it’s true, unfortunately.”
“I went from years of honing my craft to sudden recognition. It was quite a life-changer.”
“I find that I’m fighting to keep my energy and my passion centered on the work and not on ‘will this get me an Oscar?’ I’m not interested in looking at a role that way. That’s not what I ever did, and it’s not how I can continue to do my work.”
“My mother used to tell this corny story about how the doctor smacked me on the behind when I was born and I thought it was applause, and I have been looking for it ever since.”
“Misery left a lasting mark on me. When I die, it will be: Kathy ‘Misery’ Bates Is Dead.”
“When I first went to interview for Misery, they were saying things like, ‘You’re not Michelle Pfeiffer, you know.’ And I just don’t get the relevance of that remark. I’m not Elizabeth Taylor, either. I’m not Sean Connery. I don’t understand why it’s so important to compare people to Michael Jackson or to Madonna, or whoever—people assume you have already processed and understand.”
“The Oscar changed everything. Better salary, working with better people, better projects, more exposure, less privacy.”
“These are the days when you wish you could get instant psychoanalysis and get your sh*t together in five minutes because the reporters are at the door. I’m the kind of person who would like to go through life and not leave tracks. And I’m in a business that’s a beach.”
“I have to pay the bills just like everybody else, but it also pays my soul to work.”
“I just want to stay sane, and work. I would like to do something that’s going to contribute something to someone. I hope to continue to work. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I just keep on riding the rail here, it always sounds corny to say this, but I think it’s a spiritual path and I want to have the courage to stay on the spiritual path, whether it results in something that I find particularly pleasurable or not. If this next year takes me in a completely different direction and if the roles aren’t there, and if next year is suddenly the opposite of last year, that I have the courage to follow that path and learn what I have to learn from it. That’s what I hope. And I also really hope that I don’t take myself too seriously because it just gets too boring. And all this publicity, that’s the road that I’m very reticent to go down.”
“I really just love to work. I’m just really happy to have a job. I’ve had a great career and after 50 years in this business, I feel like I’ve finally hit the big time.”
“I don’t want to sound like a goody two shoes but I’m so just so grateful to be alive. I just try to be in the moment and enjoy every bit of my life; every contact with every person I come across.”
“I’m very lucky to be able to do what I love to do, and I hope I can keep doing it for a while.”
