Top 60 Laura Linney Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Doing the right thing has power.”

— Laura Linney

2. “Traits like humility, courage, and empathy are easily overlooked – but it’s immensely important to find them in your closest relationships.”

— Laura Linney

3. “I think everybody handles things very differently and you can conjecture, but until you’re put in that situation, you really don’t know.”

— Laura Linney

4. “A magnetic personality doesn’t necessarily indicate a good heart.”

— Laura Linney

5. “I am very lucky, because for the most part people are very nice to me, and I am still able to go about my life and ride the subway and all that.”

— Laura Linney

6. “I’ve always thought that I’m sexy in my own right, but not in a way that people thought was bankable.”

— Laura Linney

7. “People’s view of cancer will change when they have their own relationship with cancer, which everyone will, at some point.”

— Laura Linney

8. “It is always good to explore the stuff you don’t agree with, to try and understand a different lifestyle or foreign worldview. I like to be challenged in that way, and always end up learning something I didn’t know.”

— Laura Linney

9. “That’s my favorite food group: donut. I love the donut.”

— Laura Linney

10. “When you tell people, your world changes, your identity changes and people treat you differently. And then, not only do you have to deal with your own emotional response to what’s going on, but you take on everybody else’s emotional response.”

— Laura Linney

11. “The thing about death is that it’s honest. I go to things that have a core of honesty about them and there’s nothing more honest than death.”

— Laura Linney

12. “Fear, anxiety and neurosis: that’s just in the suitcase when you’re an actor.”

— Laura Linney

13. “I don’t want to spend my life in my 40s feeling bad about being in my 40s, and then all of a sudden I’m 50, and I will have missed a whole decade!”

— Laura Linney

14. “We all have a limited amount and that it’s a privilege to grow old. That’s something that I think a lot of people have forgotten in this very fast-paced world where youth is overly celebrate.”

— Laura Linney

15. “I think everyone’s journey through this crazy, weird, wild, wonderful area of work named acting is really their own. And if you’re going for something that isn’t yours, you’re wasting time. You could be focused on your own work instead of thinking about somebody else.”

— Laura Linney

16. “Things get complicated at times, so there are certainly moments when you wish your life were different. That’s true for everybody, not just people in our profession. But there’s nothing I feel like I gave up professionally. I’m absolutely doing what I enjoy.”

— Laura Linney

17. “I’m always curious, but I’m learning things I never thought I’d learn. I get to travel to places I never thought I’d go.”

— Laura Linney

18. “Tanning is tricky, because a lot of people just look orange.”

— Laura Linney

19. “People can’t really place me. They’re not really sure who I am. Sometimes they think I’m Helen Hunt. Sometimes they think I’m Laura Dern.”

— Laura Linney

20. “With big, emotional roles it’s very easy, especially if you’ve grown up in the American school of acting, to exploit your own pain. You have to be careful about that, because 9 times out of 10, your pain is not appropriate to the character.”

— Laura Linney

21. “My parents were divorced and I didn’t grow up with my father, but I spent a lot of time around him, and his influence on me has been profound.”

— Laura Linney

22. “I grew up in Manhattan on the Upper East Side.”

— Laura Linney

23. “I believe that no matter what you do in life, if you learn the basics through theater, it will help you in everything else – problem solving, communication, discipline, all of that stuff.”

— Laura Linney

24. “History’s a resource.”

— Laura Linney

25. “I know what people want to hear is the connection with the son, Roger, when you have a child. I would love to tell that there was an epiphany as to what it is to be a mom, but I didn’t feel any difference there.”

— Laura Linney

26. “My parents were divorced and I would spend weekends with my father.”

— Laura Linney

27. “The entertainment industry is terrified of silence.”

— Laura Linney

28. “To be too knowing is a downfall.”

— Laura Linney

29. “The basic laws of good acting are the same, but everything about the experience is different-your job responsibility, the time you spend on it.”

— Laura Linney

30. “When your life is being threatened there’s an instinctive urge to fight. You fight for the time you have, for your relationships.”

— Laura Linney

31. “I don’t think you should exploit your own pain.”

— Laura Linney

32. “When you’re dying, you’re liberated to do what you want to do. You give yourself permission. I think everyone’s experience with a terminal disease is so deeply personal and unique to the person, the context in which they’re living and the relationships that they have.”

— Laura Linney

33. “I have a bag with a toothbrush and toothpaste and all the things I might need during the day. I call the bag my trailer. Sometimes you don’t have a trailer, so that’s my trailer.”

— Laura Linney

34. “I’m very hard on my bags because I tend to carry a lot of stuff with me.”

— Laura Linney

35. “Fame didn’t happen to me in my 20s, it has been a gradual thing which probably makes it easier to deal with.”

— Laura Linney

36. “Comedy is a way to make sense of chaos. It’s a way of dealing with things that are overwhelming, that threaten you; it’s a way to survive and get closer to the truth.”

— Laura Linney

37. “Ask “why” until there is no more “why.””

— Laura Linney

38. “I love actors, regardless of where they are in their skill level. There’s something terribly satisfying about working with someone who’s really learning.”

— Laura Linney

39. “I enjoy learning about different periods and people, and then taking what’s universal about the human condition and seeing where it matches up. No matter where you are, certain things unite everybody.”

— Laura Linney

40. “What I find so interesting about people is the choices they make, and how that effects their behavior, their sense of self and their relationships.”

— Laura Linney

41. “What people can survive and what they don’t survive is shocking to me. Someone can go to Iraq and be blown to bits and survive. Someone can trip and fall on the street and they die – that’s that.”

— Laura Linney

42. “Courtroom dramas can be boring.”

— Laura Linney

43. “I think the way we talk about cancer has really evolved. I remember the way my grandmother used to talk about it, like a death sentence, no-one would even mention the word.”

— Laura Linney

44. “Most scripts are written to be green lit. They’re not written to be acted. And a lot of writers with the greatest intention in the world don’t write for actors. They don’t understand the architecture of what an actor needs to get from point A to point B.”

— Laura Linney

45. “I tend to make low-budget movies but, yeah, I make more money than I ever thought I would make.”

— Laura Linney

46. “For me to have the opportunity to stay with one character for, God willing, a long period of time, is really exciting.”

— Laura Linney

47. “My family is from the South, and I can remember all those ladies I grew up with, like my great-aunts, who had handkerchiefs. There’s something sweet about them.”

— Laura Linney

48. “I certainly didn’t have a nanny.”

— Laura Linney

49. “You know when someone’s over-flattering you in a way. You smile but you can’t believe it.”

— Laura Linney

50. “The goal seems to me at times just to be business first.”

— Laura Linney