actresses-from-iowa

"When you’re a voice actor, it’s not about you, it’s about the character. If there’s a history of that character, you want to be as true to that as you possibly can be without voice matching. Just keep the spirit alive and have it come out in your own voice. I know that’s what I did."

"“Survival isn't lying down and saying, oh, poor me. It's finding ways to live and keep your light shining in the midst of the darkest circumstances.”"

"Meaningful communication is an aspect of who we are as human beings. You don’t need to know exactly what everyone’s saying word for word to hear it, to see people living in a different world and to hear that they don’t speak American English. And you know, I think people will think, “I get what’s going on,” and that’s what’s awesome…"

"In terms of writing, I just wasn’t finding enough stories about contemporary African people—or historical, just anything, the whole gamut. I was raised in southern Africa and I came back to the West for college. I was starting to look for what I would like to perform, what I would like to see put to life onstage, and I was finding many stories about everybody else, but none about my own people. My playwriting became a “necessity being the mother of invention” type thing. I wasn’t finding what I wanted to perform, so I started to create it myself."

"I think that’s a goal in all my plays honestly, to get into the personal, but to have a macro ramification, or to look at things that people can look at as a statistic or stereotype in one way, and to make them have to spend time with a person that they may even end up relating to a little in some strange, tiny way, to see the complexity of something they might have thought of as something simply statistical and “over there somewhere.”"

"My artistic mandate up to that point had always been: “I’m not going to talk about things close to myself. I want to go into vital issues about people who you never hear or see”…And I watched my own family’s dynamics, my own dynamics amongst my kin, and the dynamics of how these cultures had merged, and interacted, and clashed. And I just found the absurdity of our familial dynamics..."

"Citizens’ right to document cruelty to animals — wherever it occurs — is crucial in helping local, state and federal officials enforce anti-cruelty laws. Authorities can’t be everywhere at once, and funding for enforcement of anti-cruelty laws is sorely lacking in most places. What we need are more cameras on factory farms, not fewer."

"Some people would rather give the appearance of feeling well by having a face-lift, exercising violently, or dieting severely—but they don't solve the problem; they only disguise it. If they ate properly, they wouldn't have to strain to seem fit; they would be fit. The simplest and most natural way usually turns out to be the easiest. Consider nursing, for instance. It's obviously the most natural way to nourish a baby, but it's also the easiest; you don't have to wake up in the middle of the night and fix bottles. If you're a vegetarian, you don't have to cook food in a smelly, greasy kitchen, or clean a lot of pots and pans with the rancid grease on them. Ugh! Though it may seem easier to take a slab of dead flesh and toss it in a broiler, it's much more interesting to do something creative with vegetables. So that my children don't have to snack on sweets or bowls of cereal—it's no better than sawdust, you know—I set out platters of avocadoes, pineapples, papayas, bananas, almonds, dried figs and prunes. … I serve organic apple juice in place of milk. I have the most beautiful golden honey for the herb tea—and so, you see, no one need feel deprived on a vegetarian diet."

"I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 35. It just happened—it just came over me. I’d gotten asthma and was having trouble sleeping, getting less than an hour of sleep a night. … I decided I wouldn’t eat meat any more, not even for a million dollars. I felt cleansed and incredible, like the inflammation in my body had been reduced. It was life-changing. … When I decided to become vegetarian, I had to learn how to ‘recook,’ if you will. … When I gave up meat, I wondered what I would make. That turned out to be vegetables, really organic and fresh. I made them very flavorful, using herbs, lemon and a little oil. I think I taught my kids well. My daughter, Dinah, for example, is also a vegetarian and doesn’t eat anything that can look at her."

"I think I’m more committed now. Some things are just serendipitous. My mother had the disease and I got involved with the organization, and then I met this splinter group out of the University of Minnesota Hospital, Dr. Karen Ashe and the team at the Grossman Center (for Memory Research and Care). I became sort of their spokesperson and then I got published. I published a first essay and a second essay and I’m up to my sixth essay. I speak all over the country and sometimes all over the world. It’s grown and blossomed into something that feels right. I’ve had a really good life and a wonderful career. I’ve been comfortable and I’ve been healthy. And I adored my mother. So this is my way to give back."

"I am, constitutionally, an actress and I think to be an actor is not only a different kind of discipline, but it’s completely introspective. So the solitude which is absolutely mandatory to write well is, I think, is hard for me. It’s training muscles I haven’t used very much. I love to write. I can write. But I’ve done nothing like this before and it will be a challenge."

"I loved King Kong with Fay Wray. That was one of my favorite pictures. I admired Fay. I thought Fay Wray was so beautiful. I remember later I went to a party and she was there and I sat at her feet and said, 'You were my favorite actress', and I told her how much I worshiped her."

"I used to buy whatever was on sale, now it is always Folger’s. Think what would happen at the checkout counter if I bought something else."

"I’d done commercials before, you had to smile and be phony, and that’s not my style. The spot was created to be warm and homey, to lend itself to realism. That’s important to me."

"They consider me a friend, it shows in their faces, and I’m a sucker for that."

"It was during the war, and they thought Kraft was too Teutonic, and they said I would be compared to Kraft cheese if I were bad."

"I think to be an artist it means a certain sensitivity, because I believe in evolution. I believe the more sensitive you are the more you draw from this One Mind; which is part of the whole, part of everything. I think we all have that ability to be tuned in, but I think great artists are just more tuned in. One who's expressing God to the fullest, that's an artist."

"That was the only picture I ever made that literally came back to haunt me. Because it was the one, when television became so popular, that they showed. And they're still showing it all over the world, you know that? I get recent letters from Holland, Germany, from all over where they must have just been running it because I always recognize that they come from the same city at the same time."

"I think the best thing about the picture is that we do feel for the Creature. We feel for him and his predicament and where he is and so on. I think that’s a very positive thing really. I like that we feel sympathy for the Creature."

"Oh, it was a real shock when we saw the Creature. And you can see from the pictures in the book that I look a little awestruck, kind of taken aback when I saw it at first. I thought it was quite wonderful, extraordinary, and a little scary which of course is exactly what is was supposed to be."