Winona Ryder Quotes - Page 2

Suddenly you're the mom, or you go from ... You're not an ingénue, you don't want to play an ingénue, but it's like that line in The First Wives Club [1996]: "There are only three ages for women in Hollywood: babe, district attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy."

In high school, I dressed up as every James Bond girl. I was a teenage Pussy Galore.

I remember the whole thing with the word ambition. I was messed up for a while because I associated it with certain people who just want to be famous. I think, for a while, it was kind of a dirty word for women.

As an actress, you go where the stories are. I don't really care where it's seen, at this point. I just want to tell good stories and do good roles that I haven't done before.

I'm the type who'd rather not work than work on something I'm not into. I've done that a couple of times, and I feel like I can totally see it in my performance.

I was mid-sentence when the casting director said, "Listen, kid. You should not be an actress. You are not pretty enough. You should go back to wherever you came from and you should go to school. You don't have it." She was very blunt - I honestly think that she thought she was doing me a favor.

I remember when I first started being in magazines, I had pretty thin skin. I was this nerd that read books and stayed home and didn't go out.

For a long time, I was almost ashamed of being an actress. I felt like it was a shallow occupation. People would be watching my every move.

I love books and going to bookstores. My favorite sound is the sound of the needle hitting the record.

I thought it was a cool parallel. Being replaced by the young thing. I know that definitely happens in Hollywood. It's harder to find good roles, and suddenly there's new girls. I'm at that age I've been warned my whole life about.

I love my job. But all the stuff that comes with it, the thought of being propelled into the limelight again is not something I sit around and fantasize about, certainly. I'd much rather just do my work, and then go home and read my books and watch movies.

It's an indication of how cynical our society has become that any kind of love story with a sad theme is automatically ridiculed as sentimental junk.

The actors that I do know are people who I think have souls, you know?

As an actress, you want to try new things. You don't want to repeat yourself. That becomes more important to you, as you get older.

You're lucky if you're in three great movies, or even one great movie. I've been so lucky. But if you rely on the business to dictate whether you're happy, it gets really complicated. You just can't do that. There have been times in my life that I've done that, and I've found it depressing.

I was very depressed after breaking off my engagement with Johnny ten years ago. I was embarrassingly dramatic at the time, but you have to remember I was only 19 years old.

I'm quite comfortable looking at myself in movies, probably because I've been doing it for so long, since I was a kid. So I sort of watched myself grow up and go through adolescence, like, basically on camera.

What's awful about being famous and being an actress is when people come up to you and touch you. That's scary, and they just seem to think it's okay to do it, like you're public property.

I love photography and first editions. I have that in my genes. My father was an archivist.

My father believes that Western religions are death cults, which I agree with.

I remember realizing, when I did Little Women [1994], that that was the only time girls that age were being written about. It was always boys - from David Copperfield to Lord of the Flies to Holden Caulfield. There were never young women going through adolescence or teen years; there were only little girls.

I was exhausted and going through a terrible depression.

Somehow I was invited to visit with Audrey Hepburn. I had this afternoon with her, and she gave me a couple things. She was so gracious and everything you would think that she would be.

I'm too young to play lawyers. But I've been really lucky because I never got labeled. I never did the John Hughes thing. I did adult movies. I'm not bragging or anything, but I think that I've chosen really good roles. I've played different people and showed that I have a little bit of range.

I have this sense that I didn't really start growing up until my twenties.