Holland Taylor quotes: on sexuality, self-sufficiency, surviving quarantine, and more.
“You have a very changeable life. You have a life filled with not only the variety of your activity, but the variety of all the people that you’re thrown in the company of and the different places that you go. I think it’s a matchless life.”
“I think that it’s very emblematic of the joys of life and what you get thrown into. The things you wouldn’t necessarily choose for yourself, that can be very remarkable.”
“Once you’re in, you can’t get out. It’s rock and roll!”
“I believe goodwill will win the day. Anybody who wishes to be an ally, the strongest thing to do is to listen and learn and study. There’s plenty of sources, there’s plenty of places to go to learn and understand. Then when you know something, and contribute, and participate, you take guidance in how to do that.”
“Timing, whatever the hell that is, is some sort of inner sense that tells you when to pause, or when to do what. You have an instinct and a knowledge.”
“Some things are more important than others.”
“I can be a bully with myself but I’m learning to treat myself with more kindness. I think one’s destiny is to become one’s own parent, in a way. We all become orphans and we realize that the only one looking out for us, ultimately, is us.”
“I love Twitter, I wonder what the future will be? Everything has its time and its season of catching the public imagination. I wonder what it will become. Facebook is wonderful to keep people in touch. When I was a kid friends lived in your same town, or were related by blood, but it’s a different world now. I’m all for it, I love participating!”
“Art is how people express what they must say to the world. Without art, we really don’t have our society moving forward. Art is what moves us forward.”
“My parents were very well-spoken and very well-educated. I received a very good education on the East Coast and I was, as a young person, a very big reader of fine literature. I think I just come by it by exposure.”
“I’ve been around a long time, and I was brought up when people behaved a certain way and spoke a certain way. And, as I say, my parents were very well-spoken.”
“I’ve always had a hunger for realizing myself through my career.”
“I hustled when I was very young because I did not go to Yale or Juilliard, so I had no society when I came to New York. I knew no one. I just came blind and I had no idea what to do or how to make my way. And I was lucky. I had small roles in a number of off-Broadway shows and a number of Broadway shows. I worked fairly steadily, but it is true that I’ve gotten some really fantastic roles later in my career. I had to work. I just simply had to have a job.”
“I’ve always supported myself since I arrived in New York right out of school, and never had any source of income other than what I made from acting.”
“I’m just cutting a swath of b*tchiness through the world.”
“I’ve often played very strong, flashy, kind of inadvertently mean women. I am not that way in my real life.”
“If you watch a person closely, you can sort of get into their space. I don’t ever lose myself as an actor. I’m not that kind of actor. I emotionally and creatively get into a place where my craft allows me to behave in a way to seem to be a person. It’s always a created effort. It’s not a psychological trick.”
“If you don’t have range when you’re my age, you better quit.”
“I have to do something creative. Creating your own role has its perks.”
“It took a long time to get to the place in my career where I could pick and choose what I wanted to do.”
“I’m much more interested in the experience of life than doing those things that might have made my career more at the forefront of my mind. It never was. I had a lot of ambition when I get a part, and how hard I will work with it, because acting is what I do. I identify myself there.”
“I suppose I would try to write if I couldn’t act, because I do like the creativity of writing. I like the task. I like the nature of the work. It’s problem-solving in a way. I guess the thing that’s hard about it is the sedentary nature of it.”
“I have a lot of opinions. I also have a lot of questions. I tweet some things to see what the response will be, because I wonder if the way I’m feeling about something, if I’m alone, or if a lot of people share the same point of view.”
“I would say I think it is interesting to notice in my life that the free agency that I’ve had is not given to many women. And it’s a real privilege and it’s a real gift from good fortune to live an actor’s life, because it’s a highly privileged life.”
“I’ve had a long, long, long career that has taken me far and wide and has brought so many remarkable people. Every job usually leaves you with a friend from that job who is a very valuable, savory taste of your life. So it’s a matchless life to have.”
“I’m the luckiest person in the world.”
“For a person who might find themselves in a situation that they fear will be misperceived or judged, maybe they could see me living my life in a way that is authentic to me. If that inspires anybody else, that can’t be a bad thing.”
“I’d say I’m gay. I really don’t like the definitions. I just feel like I’m a person. It’s not the major defining thing of my life. It’s not defining. I’m a human being. That’s defining. I just don’t have any impulse to define myself at all by anything other than a person.”
“So I never hid my life. I simply conducted my life and people could assume whatever they wanted to about who I was with or what I was doing. But I didn’t speak about it because I was offended by the idea that I should be expected to.”
“I think there’s a greater appreciation of time and what you have together and what’s important, and it can make the little things seem very small. I can’t say it any other way than there’s a poignancy to it, and a heightened sense of time and the value of time.”
“It’s a very hard medicine to take about what getting older really means, it’s almost like you have to get old in order to be strong and wise enough to bear getting old.”
“I’m well aware of the privilege of being healthy, housed and employed in the age of COVID. But… people shouldn’t forget that this has been a trying period. I think it’s very depriving in ways that sound like we’re whining, but not really. We’re very used to having the support of a society around us, as wonderful as it is that we can talk on the phone and do the Zoom things and FaceTime stuff. It does make a difference. Just imagine living through the influenza of 1918 where nobody had anything.”
“I firmly think anybody would do very well during quarantine to find a project that is sufficiently interesting that they’ll stick to, where you have to do it two hours a day because it’s a very stabilizing thing to do in a time of anxiety. Something wholesome, something nourishing, something that a year later you could say, ‘Well, this is what I did during that whole time, and how glad I am that I did it.'”
“It might really be a long time before we’re back at work, and that makes me really terribly, terribly sad. I wasn’t planning on spending this time in my life not being able to work.”
