Debra Winger Quotes

The minute we have a pain, we want a diagnosis. So I think the minute we feel love, it's very hard to just let it be. We want to identify it, we want to catalog it, we want to keep the thing and create the environment it happened in. That's where marriage comes from! Let's make an institution out of it!

Denying the lines on our faces makes a comment about age and wisdom I don't care to make.

Writers often have a 'drunk' that is different than anyone else's. That's why it's so insidious and so damning. First of all, because they can write when they're drinking - or they think they can. A lot of writers will tell me - and this is the latest one I've heard - you drink while you're thinking about what to write, but when you actually write, you sober up.

I think that we definitely deal with that issue and don't ignore it, the issue of drink, but that's not where it ends. I just think that what the fear is that you think alcoholic writer or whatever and you forget the intelligence that can be present. I mean so many people just write off someone who drinks as one thing.

I had a very insightful friend who warned me back when I stopped reading scripts, 'It's easier to change directions while you're still moving.' If you stop, it's harder to get started again. I still don't think I made the wrong decision, but he was right.

I will walk out on a scene if it's all lit and ready to go but it's not happening.

I love telling stories. When people interview me live I'm totally forthcoming about stories like that - as long as it's not going to be in print or recorded. It's just for whoever's in the audience. It's always been for me kind of fun and then everyone walks out of there, "She told this story about da da da" but nobody can prove it.

There's a small club of women who are willing to age.

I don't think that I'm that easy to live with. I have to be reminded that I can have fun. I need my family to remind me in a loving and nice way to lighten up.

I make decisions for my life, not the other way around. Besides, when you have a kid, you must weigh everything against time with your child.

My grandmother gave birth to 13 children and I come from a long line of women who gave birth in their 40s.

It's fun to be loose. Just like on stage, all of your great ideas come from looseness.

Playing big films on festivals is SO misguided. And I know where it comes from: it comes from the head of the festival thinking that he'll play with the big guys, like that's the way to do it and it's SO not the way to do it. It's where Cannes went wrong, it's where Toronto is going wrong. I mean, I got off the plane in Cannes this year and the streets were paved with posters from studio movies. Who cares about that? Why come to Cannes for that? You're going to be able to see all those films anyway - you're not going to be able to avoid them, so I don't get it. Obviously.

If I could have one prayer answered, I would pray for patience. I move so fast sometimes. I try to slow down.

When I was younger I probably didn't understand something basic about tact, but I think it kept faint-hearted people at arm's distance and that's not such a bad thing, because life is short and I know the kind of people I want to work with.

I have enjoyed a wonderful run in films, so far, and I may, at some point, come back. But it will be in my own time and in my own style.

When you connect with a cause, it's like falling in love.

Theater is all about the rehearsal process. In fact, I think a lot of times opening night there's a mixed sadness because you're finished with a lot of people's favorite part of the process, which is finding the character and discovering it, and then you get to live it.

Once a Altman's film has been in a town, it kind of wrecks the town. It doesn't even matter what the film is because, suddenly, everybody's hip and stores start doubling prices or whatever.