Katherine Heigl quotes: on not taking any crap, how mom always has her back, career versus family, skill over sex appeal, and more.
“The more you want it… the more you are looking for it, the more you repel it for whatever reason. I don’t know why. If you kind of create this vacuum, let life take its course, then you tend to free yourself up for the unexpected.”
“You never know the biggest day of your life is the biggest day. Not until it’s happening. You don’t recognize the biggest day of your life. Not until you’re right in the middle of it. The day you commit to something or someone. The day you get your heart broken. The day you meet your soul mate. The day you realize there’s not enough time… because you want to live forever. Those are the biggest days. The perfect days.”
“I have very little patience for people who whine and complain about life not being fair. It’s just the risk of life. The only thing to do is live as much as you can and as best you can, and just sort of swing it from there.”
“Isn’t it better to be alone than pretend you’re someone else? Be you. Find you. Be happy with that.”
“I do like change. That’s the one thing exciting about me.”
“Business is business… but I want there to be some cooperation between the business end and the creative end, so there’s some way of keeping it real.”
“You don’t have to do it all. And it’s so funny that I have to remind myself of that. It seems obvious, doesn’t it? For me and many of my friends, you fall into a trap of feeling like, I can do it, so I should. It’s a battle to remind myself not to try to be perfect, not to try to do it all, not to try to do it all perfectly.”
“I’m not a rude person. I’m not an unkind or mean person. I would never go out of my way or consciously try to hurt anyone’s feelings or make them feel bad or uncomfortable or not be professional, not do my job. I like my job. But I will continue to stand up for myself and I’m never going to stop standing up for my right to be heard, my right to be treated respectfully and professionally in return, my right to draw boundaries. I am a strong woman, and I’m not going to apologize for that.”
“People make mistakes – they say things they shouldn’t have or didn’t necessarily mean. But I strongly believe in consequences. If there are none, someone might feel like they’ve gotten away with something, or that what they said couldn’t have been that bad.”
“When I’m writing, I can totally control what goes out, so I still show the truest version of myself possible.”
“When people show you who they are, believe them. I carry that mantra with me a lot. It has served me well.”
“I think that everybody has a right to their own thoughts, their own feelings and their own private moments, if they want them.”
“I think a lot of women innately know how to play their hand. I’m not a big one for the rules.”
“We are all human beings, part of the human race, and we need to be compassionate and giving and kind with one another.”
“So much about living life, to me, is about humility and gratitude. And I’ve tried very hard to have those qualities and be that person.”
“As women, we have more of a tendency to be people-pleasers, and I know a lot of women who are not vocal about what makes them happy. I’m not out burning bras, but I’m very opinionated about women owning their power.”
“I think the most important thing I want my daughters to know is I want them to be unstoppable in whatever it is they’re passionate about. I want them to have an unwavering faith in themselves.”
“It’s easy to be taken advantage of if you’re not honest.”
“I do think you’ve got to fight a lot of the time to be respected in business, in relationships, in life. I learned that early in my career.”
“When something disappointing happened, my mother would remind me not to let that become my focus. There’s still so much to be grateful for.”
“My mother remains my business partner. She manages everything – finances, agents, lawyers, publicists, contacts with studios, producers, all of it. My mother is a great source of advice and wisdom and consolation for me. I kind of just want to do my job, and I need someone I can trust to handle all the rest of it. This is a woman who was a homemaker, making Martha Stewart recipes, but she learned fast. She didn’t care if she made any friends in this town. Her job was to protect me and to be very fierce in defending me. I always have one person saying, ‘If you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to do it.’ With other people, your agenda is never the most important agenda.”
“My mother was the only one who thought what I wanted was important. She is really smart and really savvy, and she refuses to make choices based on fear. This is a fear-dominated industry; it’s about rise and fall, and my mother refuses to be intimidated by that. This is all a game of chicken, and my mother is really good at chicken.”
“I had a wonderful childhood. Things were very simple. Everyone else went to beer parties; we played sardines and charades and Scrabble and went to Baskin-Robbins. It was innocent, and it was lovely – because life gets complicated soon enough. Life gets hard soon enough.”
“I was the youngest child and really spoiled. I loved to play make-believe. I loved pretending to be all kinds of different people and it just seemed natural that I would go into acting.”
“I decided then that I only wanted to act, and I did movies until I graduated from high school. Acting and modeling were like a hobby, kind of like my after-school sport. I was never really good at the things that New Canaan people do, like field hockey and cheerleading, but I had something of my own that I was good at: I worked.”
“There were so many lean years. A lot of lean years.”
“I’m still working hard, but it doesn’t feel like I’m banging my head against the wall anymore. There were a lot of years of trying to get people to hire me. I was auditioning for everything, just to pay the bills, and I wasn’t doing work I wanted to do. It was disheartening.”
“I’ve lived my 20s the way I wanted to, and I’m ready for a little more sacrifice, a little more commitment. I want to be a mother; I want to start our family and focus on something other than my career. Kids are a huge sacrifice; they change everything – but I’m ready to work for things of greater importance than going out to meet someone for dinner at 10 o’clock at night.”
“I don’t want to be the person digging my own grave.”
“Obviously my career’s important to me and I’m really, really passionate about trying to keep it.”
“I never would rule out a great character or a great story. I don’t care what the forum is. If I get to tell a story that I’m excited about, I’m in.”
“I love playing a smart, ambitious, talented woman. Who doesn’t? That’s really fun for me.”
“My career is really important to me, but there have to be other great, important things in your life besides work.”
“I am a better mother for having something in my life and not just my children.”
“My career has been the number one focus of my life for as long as I could understand it was a career – since I was 17. I really wanted to be a mother. I’ve wanted to be a wife. I’ve wanted a family. And I was sacrificing one for the other, over and over again. It’s a really hard decision to make. I didn’t want to give it up. But I needed to be able to wrap my brain around both and not screw up my kids for life.”
“I chose this profession. I chose to be in the public spotlight. I can’t take one without the other. There’s always good and bad in every profession. That’s what it happens to be: scrutiny and judgment and the rumors. It’s part of what the job entails, I guess, is putting up with that, learning to live with it and not let it destroy you.”
“And if it does, you can always go out drinking.”
“In my career, I’m very grateful for the opportunities.”
“I dreamed about these moments, and I think I hoped I would have them, but you don’t know. So when the lucky break hits, it’s like being Cinderella and hopefully midnight doesn’t come.”
“I’m grateful people think I’m beautiful or sexy, and I suppose it’s better than the alternative, but I do try to fight it a bit so it’s not all people see me as. And I’d love to one day be in a position where I could choose a role to showcase my creativity versus just my bra size.”
“I’m still figuring out who I am. But at least I know what I want.”
“I decided I was sick of trying to figure out what everybody else wanted, and I should just decide what I want, and be honest, and not spend all my time guessing.”
“All these doors are opening. I’m trying to savor the opportunities. My mother says she thinks I wouldn’t have appreciated success the same way if it had come faster or more easily. Now it’s a much bigger reward.”
“I want to stay in the moment and enjoy the great things that are happening.”
“I pride myself on being kind. But that’s not to say there aren’t moments when I’m a diva. Everybody has bad moments. Still, there are people in my life who keep me grounded, so I couldn’t behave that badly, even if I wanted to.”
“Of course I’m grateful. How can I not be grateful? I have been afforded such a wonderful life.”
Related: Josh Duhamel quotes.
