Ellen Barkin

Actress

1955-04-16

Quotes by Ellen Barkin

• But one of the hardest things for me to do was to access anger. I could do it on stage. But when I did it on film it was hard for me. That probably has to do with the intimacy of film. And my own personal issues with expressing anger. So I had to learn how to do that.

  Read quote

• It is clear I was never the Pretty Girl. I had my two front teeth knocked out when I was 10 and didn't fix them until I was 19. I have a crooked smile and a nose that looks like it's been broken 12 times but never has been. My nose was always red, so people called me Rudolph. My whole face is off-center.

  Read quote

• I'm tenacious, I think - I know - and I do also have a quality where if you tell me I can't do something, if I know I can't do it I'm the first to raise my hand and say, 'I can't do that.' But there is a big Bronx, New York Jew in me that just says, 'Really? Really? You think I - yes, I can. I can do it. I can do it.'

  Read quote

• I remember my first friend who got sick. It was 1981, and the disease was called the gay cancer. I don't think the word 'AIDS' came out until '84. I just remember it being terrifying as more people got sick. We didn't know how you could catch it, you heard all kinds of crazy things.

  Read quote

• Would you just strap some toe shoes on and dance 'Swan Lake?' No. Would you just put a violin in your hand and - ? No. I felt that way about acting, and I was taught to feel that way. I didn't come to it on my own.

  Read quote

• 'Normal Heart' was my most transcendent moment as an actor.

  Read quote

• When a 12-year-old, a 13-year-old, so desperately wants a baby what she's looking for is the kind of unconditional love a child gives a mother and a mother gives a child.

  Read quote

• I'm just curious, who's more fit to raise a child? A loving committed same-sex couple or an unmarried 15-year-old with no income and really no skills to parent?

  Read quote

• I have skinny genes. My mother weighs 90 pounds.

  Read quote

• I'm not limited by my gender, and I don't think anyone else should be either. Because I am the age I am and I sort of rode the crest of the first profound post-suffragette feminists, I wasn't fighting to burn my bra. Those women fought that fight just seconds before I came into womanhood.

  Read quote

• Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.

  Read quote