Julianne Moore quotes: perspective from the actor slash author.
“We have to work for a living, but it is your life, so make sure you find something that you enjoy doing and people that you enjoy doing it with. Then, hopefully, you’ll have a happy life.”
“If you can be in a state of mind where you enjoy your job, whether it’s just a job, or it’s actually cathartic for you, or it’s something personal. I think it would be much easier to be content with doing a good job.”
“Nobody does a lot of plotting. They can’t. Everybody wants to do that in life, but I think it’s almost impossible. Opportunities present themselves, and you say, ‘Hey, is this interesting to me?’ Is this something you might want to pursue? Maybe you’ll get it, maybe you won’t. It really does have to do with a ‘one foot in front of the other’ kind of thing, I think.”
“Behavior is mutable. It changes from place to place. It’s like accents, dialect—it varies from one area to another. But there are universal truths about what it means to be a human being. All the other stuff is like appliqué.”
“I think imperfections are important, just as mistakes are important. You only get to be good by making mistakes, and you only get to be real by being imperfect.”
“Life is full of compromises, and whether or not you’re willing to negotiate.”
“You have to be in yourself, but engage with the world and see what’s going on.”
“Treat everyone equally. Period. That’s the issue.”
“My mother always told me that for a person to be happy they need love and work. This is important to every human being—not just to men, not just to women—but to all of us. We obviously need support in order to have these things too.”
“Put the hours in and do the work. You can’t hack your way through the work. You have to just do it.”
“Either you like a person or you don’t like a person. I don’t have to love somebody to work with them. I’m a professional person. But when you get the bonus of really liking someone and really connecting with them and really enjoying them, it’s a fantastic thing.”
“Loving someone is giving them the power to break your heart, but trusting them not to.”
“There was a period of time in America where the advertising world actually went to the housewives of America and had them write jingles that would appeal to them. It was actually brilliant marketing.”
“Art is an expression of who we are, what we believe, and what we dream about.”
“I wouldn’t be an actor if it weren’t for the English teacher I had my junior year in high school. She’s the one who told me I could be an actor. I had never met an actor, I had never seen a real play, only high school plays. I didn’t know actors were real, that it was a real job.”
“I always say about acting: the audience doesn’t come to see you, they come to see themselves. So if you’re able to give them an experience where they feel, ‘Oh, my gosh, that’s me, that’s my story, they know!’ then you’ve done your job.”
“Movies don’t lead the charge, they reflect culture, so these things will show up onscreen once we’ve seen them in life. Film should be a representation of what’s happening in the real world.”
“In all of the movies and films you see, people are always in crisis because that’s what we watch. We watch them deal with crisis and resolve it.”
“I like stories about people. I like things that are human and different. I want to be as engaged in my work as I am in reading a book. I want to be electrified by the films I do.”
“The funny thing about acting is that whenever you feel like you’re done with it, something else pops up. That’s what’s great about it, it does encompass so much learning: every time I do a job, I have to learn about something else. You learn an accent, you learn a little bit of a language, you study behavior, you pick up different skills. I don’t know why but if it’s a work thing, I’m able to put it in a part of my brain where I go, ‘Okay I am learning this thing because it’s for this job.'”
“You just have to find a way to focus. You have to be aware of what you are doing. That requires an intense focus.”
“A feeling is something that’s really important to have. Real life is not always easy. You cannot always look at the good stuff. But just because something is not positive, it’s not like it’s going to kill you. You don’t have to say, ‘No, no, no.’ It’s important and oddly, one of the reasons why we read or go to the movies and we drive cars in circles really fast and go to amusement parks and we travel is because we want to inject new life into something. We want to feel something.”
“I do like to work. I have my kids’ books that I do, I have movies that I do, and I model.”
“My life may be a pretty crazy life at times, but it’s a very privileged one… being able to earn a good living doing what you love. Not many people have such an opportunity.”
“I hope this brings someone else the courage they need to face whatever challenge is before them.”
“My mother brought us to the library every week, and I read a lot. That’s what kept me company. I went from school to school, but there was always reading.”
“I was the kid who read a lot and who was academic, and who was more of an indoor person than an outdoor person. I would win the summer reading contest at the library.”
“I was a bookworm, and very skinny with big, thick glasses. I never went on dates and guys were afraid of me because I was smart. So I got contact lenses, started to dress a little better and tried not to talk about Plato with boys. It worked!”
“I’m older than I was before when I was young.”
“Older, you know, is obviously relative. You’re older if there’s somebody younger than you in the room, and you’re younger if there’s someone older in the room.”
“If you’re 50, you’re never going to be 50 ever again, so enjoy being 50. If you sit through the year wishing you were younger, before you know it, it’s going to be over, and you’re going to be 51.”
“The thing about 50 is that you’ve clearly reached a point where you have more of your life behind you than ahead of you, and that’s a very different place to be in. You’re thinking, ‘I’ve done most of it.’ I don’t like that feeling. But it makes you evaluate your life and go, ‘Am I doing what I want to do? Am I spending my time the way I want?'”
“A midlife crisis is nothing but getting to the point where you go, ‘Have I done what I wanted to do? Am I living the life that I want to live? Am I appreciating what I have?’ If you don’t get to that point developmentally, you’re not doing it correctly. The people who get to that age and haven’t reassessed usually haven’t faced the fact that that’s where they are.”
“I have a very, very normal life. I really do, with the exception of being very lucky and privileged.”
“What gives you pleasure and joy? Let those be the things that lead you forward in life.”
Related: Jodie Foster quotes.
