Top 100 Claire Danes Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Counterterrorism isn’t really about the nunchakus, the guns and gadgets. It’s about psychology.”

— Claire Danes

52. “I’ve always had a really active imagination. Lots of kids have imaginary friends. Mine just took on a rather demonic form.”

— Claire Danes

53. “However, I’m at a very comfortable place in my career and celebrity, in that I don’t have to audition as extensively as I used to for roles but yet I’m not immediately recognizable.”

— Claire Danes

54. “I discovered Christopher Isherwood in college. His writing style is so direct, warm, and inclusive.”

— Claire Danes

55. “Growing up, I wanted desperately to please, to be a good girl.”

— Claire Danes

56. “Acting is a humiliating job, from start to finish.”

— Claire Danes

57. “It’s funny with jeans now, because if they don’t feel like a pair of sweatpants, I don’t have patience for them anymore! I think I’m becoming increasingly lazy.”

— Claire Danes

58. “I love love and falling in love, but it can get pretty flat real fast.”

— Claire Danes

59. “By the time I went to Yale, I’d been acting for a long time and I was really tired of it. I was restless – and a little bored – and I was really eager to investigate different parts of myself.”

— Claire Danes

60. “I was told that my going to college wouldn’t be good for my career. I think that’s nonsense. It’s good to empower yourself by cutting yourself off from this business every once in a while.”

— Claire Danes

61. “I could truly have gone through life thinking that women were these venomous creatures. Turns out, they’re not.”

— Claire Danes

62. “In New York City, everybody goes into therapy.”

— Claire Danes

63. “I used to have nightmares when I was a little kid that I woke up prematurely and opened all the Christmas presents. And then I would be so relieved when I woke up and I realized that I hadn’t done it.”

— Claire Danes

64. “I think people who make movies and have invested a lot of money in them, get frightened that if they challenge an audience they are going to repel them. And I think the opposite it’s really true. It takes confidence and courage to know that and then commit to it.”

— Claire Danes

65. “I guess I stopped acting when I was 18 and didn’t pick it up again until I was 21. That wasn’t the plan, though. When I first started at Yale, the plan was to do a movie each summer.”

— Claire Danes

66. “The first time I realised I was patriotic was after September 11th.”

— Claire Danes

67. “I played a girl. There’s really nothing controversial about her. She’s just fine. She has to be fine in order to make Sarah Jessica’s character pop, I say I just play a white girl in that movie.”

— Claire Danes

68. “Oliver Stone’s strategy is to unnerve the actors so as to make them alert and alive.”

— Claire Danes

69. “College was just so essential for my sense of self and my development.”

— Claire Danes

70. “Yeah, there was the Flora Plum thing, where I trained for about a month and I had taken a semester off for that, and two weeks prior to filming, the financing collapsed.”

— Claire Danes

71. “I have to expose myself and then accept the judgment that audiences and critics will have. And that’s okay. I appreciate the elliptical nature of it. Sometimes people are more in the mood to be nice to me than others, and that’s great.”

— Claire Danes

72. “Every time I make a movie, I’m prepared for it to become influential and career-defining – but I have no control over these things.”

— Claire Danes

73. “My parents never condescended to me. As a child, I always sat at the head of our dinner table. I was always given a lot of responsibility.”

— Claire Danes

74. “I was a serious kid to an absurd degree. I was overwhelmed with responsibility. You know, trying to play grown up. I overdid it.”

— Claire Danes

75. “Autism does exist on a spectrum, and there are so many manifestations of it, so many kinds of expressions of it. And every case is particular.”

— Claire Danes

76. “I like marriage. I feel very secure. It helps when you are in love with the person you are married to.”

— Claire Danes

77. “My first offer was when I was 12, and it was for a soap opera. And I turned it down because I knew that I was an unformed actor, and I didn’t want to develop bad habits.”

— Claire Danes

78. “I would sign on for projects that were meant to shoot in July, and then they would postponed and they would bleed into the following semester, and then I’d take a semester off, and then the movie would collapse.”

— Claire Danes

79. “As a young performer, I didn’t know that you can have a great time playing someone in terrible crisis. The more you know it’s not real, the deeper you can go into it. And the easier it is to let it go when it’s done.”

— Claire Danes

80. “I was a pretty nerdy kid. I was pretty nerdy. I’m still kind of nerdy. I have all of the worst qualities of being a nerd – all of the affect and none of the smarts. I’m a useless nerd! That’s pretty bad.”

— Claire Danes

81. “I’m only realizing now that I was a child actress because I always took myself so seriously.”

— Claire Danes

82. “When I was 18 I went to college for two years and didn’t work for a year which was essential for me, because my identity had been so influenced by my being an actor and I think I just needed to discover what it was to be myself, divorced from all that responsibility.”

— Claire Danes

83. “I hadn’t been free from adult responsibilities since I was 12, and I needed to experience that. I really needed to just be a kid again.”

— Claire Danes

84. “I am a feminist. And I’m so glad that Lena Dunham exists, because she is one too, and she’s quite vocal about it. Yes, women have more freedom and more influence than ever, but it’s hardly equal. It’s just not.”

— Claire Danes

85. “I think I would make a lousy stay-at-home mom. It just wouldn’t suit me.”

— Claire Danes

86. “I fantasized about being a psychology major when I first started school, and I took a handful of Psych 101 classes.”

— Claire Danes

87. “My husband and I have watched a lot of Hitchcock movies in bulk, and there’s a lot to be gained from that, from focusing strictly on an artists canon.”

— Claire Danes

88. “You know, let a few years go by until I hit my midlife crisis. Then that can be documented on film.”

— Claire Danes

89. “The big question is always, ‘Eyes or lips?’ I tend to go with the eyes because I’ve got a lot more material to work with now – and it saves me from reapplying lipstick! I’m a pretty low-maintenance person and it’s too excessive to exaggerate both the eyes and lips.”

— Claire Danes

90. “You don’t realize how useful a therapist is until you see yourself on e and discover you have more problems than you ever dreamed of.”

— Claire Danes

91. “I really liked Yale, although it was extremely intimidating. When I visited the campus, I was hiding behind trees, I felt so unworthy.”

— Claire Danes

92. “I got an agent when I was 12, and I started working in more amateur productions well before that. But even as a kid, I never felt like a kid actor, you know? I always took myself kind of absurdly seriously.”

— Claire Danes

93. “I’m human. I think people see me as sweeter and softer than I do.”

— Claire Danes

94. “I’ve always very earnestly tried to do my best, so I just have to trust that and forgive myself for being fallible.”

— Claire Danes

95. “I think because I am as earnest as I am, people were accepting of my evolving into a certified, legitimate, and grown up and I did take three years off.”

— Claire Danes

96. “I love sitting in the makeup trailer and getting my makeup done in 15 minutes as opposed to an hour and a half.”

— Claire Danes

97. “I think the voice over actually enhances the various moments instead of compensating for something that’s lacking. Voice over can be tricky. It can be dangerous because its over used or inappropriately used. I think in this case it informs the story.”

— Claire Danes

98. “I discovered Orson Welles in college; my freshman English professor screened ‘Citizen Kane’ for us, and I wound up writing a 20-page term paper on it.”

— Claire Danes

99. “I have this home in New York, I have a long-term relationship with my boyfriend, who’s from Australia, and I had this business that I had maintain. Even though I wasn’t actively shooting, there’s a lot of peripheral work.”

— Claire Danes

100. “What I needed was a connection to life that was real and lasting.”

— Claire Danes