Lauren Graham Quotes

Writing a memoir isn't particularly interesting to me. I'm not like Ellen [DeGeneres], where I can write, 'Water bottles--they're crazy!' and it's funny.

I've dated people who I thought were going to be a big deal in my life, and I've also spent long periods by myself.

It's core to my beliefs now: Sometimes in being given a challenge, you're actually being given a real opportunity, and a lot of that is how you handle it. Do you feel sorry for yourself or do you think, All right! I'll see what I can make out of this? I've had that over and over. If I hang out in the disappointment, I'll just be disappointed all the time.

Well, it's more of a sane life to be part of an ensemble! I find that the work can be more specific too and I have to really make sure I know where I am in the story because I'm not in every scene.

There's nothing more important than a good story.

Anyone can smile on their best day. I like to meet a man who can smile on his WORST.

The thing I don't like on television is when somebody does something that makes absolutely no sense just for the shock of it.

When the creator of the show is gone, the actors end up being the people who have been there the longest.

My biggest goal was - I thought, God, if I could just be a rep company member at the Arena Stage in Washington, D. C. and get to play a bunch of parts in a year! And now in my work everything is about promoting it. It's not about the doing of it! Everything is: You have to sell it, and they ask you to tweet about it or do photo shoots, even for the smallest job. There's an imbalance in terms of what is actually gratifying. The stuff that is gratifying is, like I said, the day of work and the doing of it.

I was always torn between wanting whatever I pictured as a typical high school experience and that being just a part I wanted to play. I've written about this, but one of those typical high school experiences was drill team. Like, I just really wanted to wear a uniform and get on the bus and be part of this group. As an only child, the idea of blending in - and literally everyone being in sync and not standing out at all - felt like kind of a fun family thing.

While I very much wanted to be in a relationship, I didn't want to be in the wrong one.

All my references are 50 years old-when somebody shot J.R., you know? Oh my god, I'm 100!

Over and over in the play my character says, "I'm thirty-two years old," as if that should explain everything that's wrong in her life. I don't know what it's like to be thirty-two, but I can imagine. I imagine she means she's stuck in an in-between time, she's at an age that isn't a milestone but more of a no-man's-land, an age where she's feeling like her hopes are fading.

I came from a Sorkin-like project in the sense that there was no freedom to change a line, which, in a weird way, is its own freedom because you're living within that structure and know this is what it is. You just adjust. Every project has its own personality.

We're all working hard, but so far away from what we actually want to be doing. We're all peering in at the window of a party we aren't invited to yet, a party we wouldn't know how to dress for, or what kind of conversation to make, even if we came as someone's guest.

Belly buttons are cool!

I think what my hope is is that the only downside of having a steady job on television is, I think for all actors, there's a piece, there's some adrenaline, and part of the love of the job is not knowing what's coming next, and the variety.

It's great to have an acting job in the age of Reality TV.

I would rather be a person who struggled there than someone who had a great, easy time and then got out in the world and was like, "Wait a minute, I didn't get voted class president? What's going on?" You know, "popular" doesn't necessarily correlate to anything. "Popular" still has to get up at 7:00 in the morning and go to work and do something worthy too. There's no edge, really, that you get from being whatever was popular in school.

If I had a normal job and had been moving up, I'd be management level now.

Moving. Someone said this to me a long time ago, it's bhuddist saying, I think: 'There is no wasted effort'.

I think there's more pressure to stand out in a way that is measurable externally. The fame culture is definitely way worse and weirder than it was when we were in high school.

Today is the day you have to start believing in yourself. No one can do it for you anymore.

Nobody ever seems to want my advice about serious stuff. People will be like: 'Who made that sweater?' Or 'How did you get your hair so straight?' They don't to come to me for the relationship advice or deep stuff. In fact, my little sister actually hides from me.

I'm sure you've felt this way along the way: Yes, I got to do what I wanted to do. But it was much harder than I thought it was going to be, and it continues to be. You never get to a place that is a place of rest. I think that's OK. It's not bad - life is hard work!

I love TV. I think I'd do a half-hour single-camera comedy.

My mother had lived in London since I was little, so she never got to see my school plays and stuff.

Texting is not flirting, if you don't care about me enough to say the words than that's not love, I don't like it!

Once again, I've been thwarted by the massive difference between my vision of the successful me and the me I'm currently stuck with.

The thing you must really do in television is bring yourself to everything you do - you can't try to be anybody else.

That's the thing that always stuck out to me - the idea that quantity becomes quality. I always took it to mean if you do anything enough, if you keep putting effort in, eventually something will happen, with or without you. You don't have to have faith when you start out, you just have to dedicate yourself to practice as if you have it.

I just don't know that a TV show demands a movie ending.

Maybe I should sit. Plenty of people use sitting as a way to pass the time.

The parts for women, you're either like the quietly suffering wife or the wild girl.

These days I have to be extra nice in stores. It never fails that whenever I look as bad as I can possibly look or I am sort of cranky because the store is out of something, that is precisely the time when someone one will recognize me and say: 'I really like your show.'

I'm gonna try to talk about this in a secular way, but where's the spirituality of just being a person? I think it contributes to this rise in bad manners and mean comments; people are being driven by seeking something that's just designed to keep them seeking something. I'm not reducing people in this age to phone-addicted dum-dums, but we have to remind ourselves to also study compassion and inner life as well.

Getting anywhere you want is hard work. In this photography culture, everything looks so amazing. But it's actually very hard to get to where anybody gets.

Personally, all I ever want to be wearing are jeans.

As I've gotten older, I've gotten more liberal, and my father is increasingly conservative. It's so shocking to me because I always thought we had the same politics. The day I realized we voted for different presidents, I practically fell out of my chair.

The best part of getting to do what you like is just doing it. That doesn't have to do with being famous or even successful or even powerful. I see people in life who are just doing a job and seem to be having a good time. And that's the trick.

I'd pay more just to hear proper English and have everyone keep their clothes on

None of my characters have really had jobs.

I must work harder to achieve my goal of not seeking approval from those whose approval I'm not even sure is important to me.

All TV shows are basically part of the same storyline.

I feel real ownership in this show. I feel very invested in it. I care very much about it. I don't feel any more like a hired hand, you know? It's a strange feeling - I feel personally responsible for how the story goes. What happens. What the weaknesses are. And so in a way, some of the changes gave me an opportunity to have a voice in a different way.

I take the no-doughnut pledge, and then I break it.

I've spent a lot of time wondering, What's going to happen? What's going to happen? I try not to allow myself to do that much anymore. I think ive gotten more comfortable with the unknown.

I remember feeling a huge amount of anxiety and worry and pressure. At that point I was headed into acting school. That was 100 percent the only thing I thought I wanted to do. But then I got through my first year of college, and I was, like, humming and rolling around, pretending to be a lion in acting classes at NYU and visiting our classmate Charlie Gregg at Harvard, where he was actually learning things. So I changed my mind: I decided I actually wanted a different kind of education, and that was an incredibly freeing idea.