Top 50 Maggie Gyllenhaal Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn’t a religion major really.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

2. “If I’ve learned anything as a mom with a daughter who’s three, I’ve learned that you cannot judge the way another person is raising their kid. Everybody is just doing the best they can. It’s hard to be a mom.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

3. “Sometimes things go really well, and sometimes they don’t, and it’s not ultimately the most important thing.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

4. “I have a couple of girlfriends who are like, healing. We take care of each other. They know when I need to be taken care of.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

5. “I didn’t think at all about my body until after I stopped nursing. When I was nursing, my body was my daughter’s, I didn’t even think about it. Then I finished nursing, and I was kind of like “Oh, huh, wow, my body’s so different.””

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

6. “I feel there is no shortage of real interesting women’s roles. But I found them and did all of them just now.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

7. “You’re not going to do good work if you’re not choosing something because it inspires you.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

8. “What I think is new is the wealth of roles for actual women in television and in film. That’s what I think is revolutionary and evolutionary.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

9. “I’m still trying to figure out what the right line is between myself and the people I play. Sometimes I go too far one way or too far the other.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

10. “Now, there are roles which are capturing a vibrant moment in an older woman’s life. There was a time when those interesting roles stopped at 28. A few years ago we would have been finished by our age.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

11. “Having an education is invaluable.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

12. “I am looking for movies that are actually about something and that are questioning something. Movies that are provocative in some way and I am also looking for roles that I think will force me to grow or learn something about myself or the world in order to play them well.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

13. “You’re invited to tons of parties, and you’ll wear these shoes and that dress, and it can be enticing, but I think it also sucks you dry. If you do it a little, sure, it’s fun, but too much and you start to lose your footing.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

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14. “We have our phones right by our beds, right next to us in our most exposed, vulnerable moments. And yet the government could have been collecting information from our phones at any moment. I think that basically as humans, we feel that’s a violation.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

15. “I don’t even notice the advertisement that comes up on my screen. I’m a smart person and it’s just something I’ve just blacked out because it doesn’t seem right to me.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

16. “I really want my kids to feel, is that they can be themselves in the world.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

17. “I feel so gratified about having finished college. I learned how to articulate myself. It gave me confidence more than anything. And also the ability to analyze the text.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

18. “I find myself more and more interested only in roles which move the world forward.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

19. “I think most human beings, even if you’re in a situation that’s constricting or complicated or hard, they try to survive.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

20. “A lot of actresses are doing incredible work right now, playing real women, complicated women. I don’t feel despairing at all. And I’m more looking with hope for something fascinating.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

21. “If you’re going to play a hooker in a movie, the movie has to have the perspective, of course, that it isn’t such a great thing. Probably the only way to really play a hooker well is to believe you’re doing something that’s good. But at the same time, the movie can’t have that point of view.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

22. “These past couple of years have been about learning to not sabotage myself in a subtler way – for instance, even just by putting moisturiser on when I get out of the shower. Learning to honour myself and believing that I’m worth taking care of.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

23. “Being a mother has absolutely forced me. You have to write things down and have systems for all of it. And then you set up systems and you realize they don’t work.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

24. “I liked that idea. Someone who’s trying to perform herself and not succeeding.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

25. “Ten years ago, it was really difficult for a young actress to walk onto a set and disagree with the director and having that be OK and have a conversation about it and everyone be cool with it.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

26. “I don’t see that many movies lately that are actually about something, that are trying to challenge something about the way that people interact.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

27. “I would like to do a big movie that many, many people see but I just know I would be miserable if it didn’t have something to it.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

28. “Honestly, I’m always aware of the political implications of the movies that I make.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

29. “The real test will be having a family; when I have a family you have to come home, you have to eat dinner with your kids.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

30. “I’m pretty good at indulging myself. I’m about to go travel for a week. I like to get massaged, go into steam rooms. I take care of myself.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

31. “I’m 37 and I was told recently I was too old to play the lover of a man who was 55. It was astonishing to me. It made me feel bad, and then it made feel angry, and then it made me laugh.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

32. “Every actor has to find space where they are free, in order to do good work.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

33. “You have a right to your opinion about the work that you’re doing. An artist is as equally important as the director. If you believe that, you can work in any circumstances.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

34. “People write things in newspapers about me that aren’t true – or that are true. They take pictures of my kids on the way to school. I get a little bit inured to it in a way that I think most people probably aren’t.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

35. “I made a movie where I played a girl that just got out of prison and we shot it very very quickly but very intensely-that took me a long time to get over.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

36. “A big part of being an actress specifically is feeling entitled to your artistic opinion, feeling that it means something, and being able to stand by it.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

37. “Who can I trust? You have to invest in somebody and chances are you’re probably going to invest in somebody who’s going to deceive you. I’ve been conned a couple of times, but now I’m a little more savvy.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

38. “I’m playing somebody who is a recovering drug addict who got out of prison. It takes place in 2 weeks-the 1st 2 weeks I’m out of prison.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

39. “I do seem to have a bit of a predilection for movies that say something transgressive.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

40. “To get people emotionally involved in something intellectual and political is important.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

41. “I want to have some effect on the way the world works in whatever way I can, and I also want to have the power to help get the movies that I think are important made.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

42. “I was thinking about how people were upset about the information that came out from Snowden about the NSA – many people were upset, including myself. But I was kind of surprised by how little we did about it – how little fighting we did.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

43. “There was something to me that was really compelling about that woman, already knowing she couldn’t get pregnant. When I made that movie I was maybe 24, and to be 24 and already know you can’t get pregnant, that was really interesting to me.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

44. “Some people would say you need what you need to work, but I need very little to work, because I learned how to make movies on tiny movies. It’s all kind of easy for me.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

45. “I don’t think there are that many parts I could say unequivocally “I would not play that,” but there’s lots of parts I read and I think, “I don’t really want to do that. I don’t really think that’s how women act.””

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

46. “There is a need, especially right now in America, to be a bit provocative.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

47. “I want roles that challenge people to question where they are in life.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

48. “A play is much easier to maintain your personal life with because if you’re rehearsing, you’re working like from 11 to 6 or 11 to 5 and you get to have your whole morning and your whole evening. When you’re doing the play, you have all day.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

49. “Acting is really important to me, so I think it would be really hard for me to do something I didn’t believe in.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

50. “I would like to have a home in the country that I could go to. First in this country and the other in the Mediterranean.”

— Maggie Gyllenhaal