Jodie Foster Quotes

Actors become actors because they loved entertaining their family by putting on the lampshade and dancing around as a kid, ... That's not my personality. For me, the fun part of making movies is seeing it as a director sees it. I like the architecture of movies. I like knowing what's coming and working to set that up.

People say as a woman actor your career is over at 40. But then they told me I would never work again after I was 16.

I was a literature major in college and that was my thing, books.

I aspire to be able to appreciate and review a director based on their accomplishments and based on who they are and what they bring to the material, regardless of their gender.

I love European movies and I kind of grew up on European films.

As an actor, I'm attracted to drama; as a director, it's humor - because it's the story of my life, and I can't be that serious about it. Being alone is a big theme in all my movies, both as a director and as an actress.

If I make two movies my entire life, and they're two movies that - whether they make a lot of money or two people go to see them - they speak of me, then I consider them incredibly successful. I don't need to be Steven Spielberg.

I saw leaving college as an opportunity to do something different with my life. I always thought that becoming an academic was going to be my path.

I'd like to be Dakota Fanning when I get young.

There is nothing more beautiful than finding your course as you believe you bob aimlessly in the current. And wouldn't you know that your path was there all along, waiting for you to knock, waiting for you to become. This path does not belong to your parents, your teachers, your leaders, or your lovers. Your path is your character defining itself more and more every day.

I prefer to commit 100 per cent to a movie and make fewer films, because it takes over your life.

If you had been a public figure from the time you were a toddler, if you'd had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, than maybe to you might value privacy above all else. I have given everything up there from the time that I was three-years old. That's reality show enough, don't you think?

Boys are easy. I mean, there are just a lot of bruises when they're young. With boys, you get a lot of accidental jabs in the eye and stepping on your feet, and those tantrums they cause when they don't want to leave the toy store.

We think, "If I have more money, I am more valuable. If I make more money, I am more valuable." It's all sort of wound up with this problem that humans have with their failure.

In a weird way, that's the beauty of being an actor. You get to live out things that you're afraid of, and you get to say, 'Well, maybe I can get to the end of it and survive it intact and I can be the hero of my own story.' It's kind of a way of exorcising fear.

I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago, back in the stone age.

I didn't grow up really wanting to be an actor. I don't remember ever not being an actor.

I was one of those avid moviegoers as a kid, and we didn't have video, so we went to see everything five times. I went to see every foreign film playing in my town. As times went on, I watched a lot less films. I have a different film school now. My film school now is my life experience.

I don't like it when reviews aren't about the movie. When they're about how much money somebody made, or who they're sleeping with, or if they got the job via some connection, or about how Fox is putting X amount of dollars into it.

I'm not interested in being perfect when im older. Im interested in having a narrative. It's the narrative that's really the most beautiful thing about women.

But the reason I became, why I wanted to be in the business was because there was Midnight Cowboy.

You hold all of our futures in your hands. So you better make it good.

When I go into the stores, I pet the saddles. Until security comes and takes me away.

Where I have problems is when I am in the midst of doing something that I am completely focused on, and then I am asked to buy shoes or something.

I will always love psychology, and the basis of psychology is family.

I absolutely love religions and the rituals. Even though I don't believe in God, we celebrate pretty much every religion in our family with the kids.

I'd prefer not to act in the film I'm directing. I think, though, as an actor, you do learn how to turn things on and off quickly and kind of compartmentalize. You learn to accommodate the camera and the other actors, to notice where the boom is and where you mark is, and be able to repeat something a few times.

There are 400 billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone. If just one out of a million of those had planets, and just one in a million of those had life, and just one out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there.

I don't have a burning desire to act strangely enough. I don't know that if I hadn't been an actor as a young person, I don't know that I ever would have chosen this because it's not really my personality.

People are always surprised when I say that I'm an atheist.

I like to nap. I do like to sleep. Sometimes I sleep in between takes.

I think an artist's responsibility is more complex than people realize.

Acting, for me, is exhausting. I'm always more energized by directing. It's more intense to direct. I can pop in and express myself, then pop out again. It's a huge passion for me.

I'm really not a clothes person. To me, that's just work. It's the thing I hate to do the most. I don't want to be judged in that way.

I'm a technician. I don't go for the get-into-the-role stuff. I read the lines and play the scenes.

There's absolutely no sort of acknowledgment or reward for this - except for the intangible of my kids growing up to be wonderful people.

I like dramas. I've always liked dramas. And I'm a pretty light person. I don't consider myself a very dramatic person. But I do like doing that onscreen.

Knowing what paint a painter uses or having an understanding of where he was in the history of where he came from doesn't hurt your appreciation of the painting.

Being an artist is a way of saying, I am here, and this is what I stand for.

Casting is a long process for me. I take a lot of time.

I've always had this idea that I wanted movies to make people better not worse.

All of the thinking and planning that you do to get there, and then, in one minute, in one second, it just doesn't matter. It goes out the window. You either got it or you didn't. There is something kind of refreshing about that.

Caitriona Balfe, who is Irish, is also in my movie. I asked her to play her Irish accent in the movie, but her own brogue is so faint that I had to keep pumping it up.

I spent a lot of time not in school, so I didn't have deep relationships with kids my own age.

Otherness is a big thing for me. I'm always drawn to characters that live lives that I couldn't lead.

I didn't have any ambition to produce big mainstream popcorn movies.

It was a weird moment in my life and a weird experience [doing a theater]. It made me think, "Gee, I don't know if I ever want to do this again." And I love theater. I love going. I love the experience of theater. But I am not sure it's for me.

I am the luckiest filmmaker I know.