Top 40 Sarah Paulson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Nobody could ever say as many terrible things to me as I say to myself.”

— Sarah Paulson

2. “To not have any hope is where things start to get really bleak. Things are possible. The impossible can be possible.”

— Sarah Paulson

3. “Acting is doing. The more you do, the more you learn. Work begets work.”

— Sarah Paulson

4. “I could feel my body temperature – I knew I was bright red. It was so humiliating, I was so upset, and it was nothing I had planned to do. It was just one of those beautiful moments, the alchemy of acting that is so mysterious, where you sort of go, “How did that come out of me?””

— Sarah Paulson

5. “If you get on a TV show that’s successful, odds are that you’re playing the same character for as many years as the show is running, which can be its own blessing, but it can also be a curse because you’re playing the same thing and that can be tiresome.”

— Sarah Paulson

6. “I was constantly, always and forever, trying to perform the musical ‘Annie’ for anyone who would listen, and I have a terrible singing voice. It was the first thing that made me think I wanted to be an actress.”

— Sarah Paulson

7. “There are rules, and when certain things happen, there are ceratin consequences.”

— Sarah Paulson

8. “To me, most of life kind of lives in the grey and I don’t just mean morally. I just mean kind of everything. If things were black and white it would be a lot clearer as to what to do all the time.”

— Sarah Paulson

9. “When I have brown hair I feel the most like myself, but I don’t feel glamorous. It’s a disgusting thing to admit.”

— Sarah Paulson

10. “I do like the immediacy of audience’s reaction. I like when I can hear the stillness and I know that they’re with us.”

— Sarah Paulson

11. “If you heard me sing, you would just plug your ears and run, screaming, the other way. I promise.”

— Sarah Paulson

12. “I remember feeling the temperature change the first time the curtain came up, the difference between the audience temperature and the stage temperature. I’ll never forget it.”

— Sarah Paulson

13. “I’ve only been to one concert in my life.”

— Sarah Paulson

14. “I’m addicted to routine. I don’t know if that’s because I moved around so much as child – by the time I was 12 years old, I had lived in about 10 different places. But I like going to the theater at a certain time.”

— Sarah Paulson

15. “I was a victim of what most people are a victim of, which is really, really just gulping down what was being fed to me by the media.”

— Sarah Paulson

16. “The idea of being on a show where each season stands alone, and you can come back the next year and show an entirely different aspect of your personality or your talent or your anything is an enormous gift that you rarely get in television.”

— Sarah Paulson

17. “It’s OK to sit in the Golden Globe room and look around and think, ‘Oh, Helen Mirren’s a loser tonight, so is Nicole Kidman. Meryl Streep lost tonight. Jessica Lange didn’t win.’ If you’re gonna be in the company of losers, that’s the company to be in.”

— Sarah Paulson

18. “I had gone away from Twitter because before people had been so mean to me. Talking about my lisp and my enormous forehead and all these things. I do have a lisp, I do have a forehead I know you could land a plane on, it’s no mystery to me. I just didn’t have the skin for it.”

— Sarah Paulson

19. “All of my friends went to college and I got a job at Circle Pizza, where I worked for 24 hours. I had to call my mother four times to ask her how to spell Parmesan. I’m not kidding. I was a terrible speller. I think I was really nervous that I somehow didn’t feel right out in the world in that way.”

— Sarah Paulson

20. “I’d love to be in the ’70s. I’d love to have a big, long wig parted down the middle with flat-ironed hair and bell-bottoms. They’re actually very flattering for my figure. The wider the leg, the better for a person with a booty.”

— Sarah Paulson

21. “All my friends went to the Madonna concert when I was in, maybe, the 9th grade, and my mother refused to let me go.”

— Sarah Paulson

22. “Anything is possible, and the truth is any human being at any given moment, no matter how good they are – not only at their job but also as a person – they’re capable of anything, and it’s not always a conscious thing.”

— Sarah Paulson

23. “I usually feel like the role comes to you to sort of illuminate some piece of where you are in your life. I feel like I myself am a single woman and I’m childless – by choice – at this point, and I don’t know what will happen.”

— Sarah Paulson

24. “I think it’s very important for people to not judge the people you’re playing. You have to find a way to love them because their story is theirs. I just don’t think there would be any use in that.”

— Sarah Paulson

25. “I like the ritual of putting on my makeup, putting on my costume, doing my warm-ups. I eat the same dinner every night before I go on stage. I like having something that I can count on, something that feels stabilizing for me.”

— Sarah Paulson

26. “The theater commitment is hard, especially in conjunction with a television commitment. That’s a big, long commitment.”

— Sarah Paulson

27. “I’m one of those actors who’s just standing there, waiting and ready for something to come my way. I don’t really try to think about, “Oh, I feel the next thing I should do should be a feature. Now, I think I should do a play.” I just hope someone wants to cast me in something.”

— Sarah Paulson

28. “When I look at my career, the bulk of it has been television, and I love working in television. But there’s a speed at which you do it. You’re doing seven to ten pages a day on a series, and it’s hard to feel like you’re doing the detail-oriented work that I like to do.”

— Sarah Paulson

29. “I am a person who is not mated.”

— Sarah Paulson

30. “I’m interested in telling the character’s story, not my beliefs, political or otherwise.”

— Sarah Paulson

31. “No, I’m not a Republican working in Hollywood, I am a Democrat.”

— Sarah Paulson

32. “I could never have thought, “I wanna play a two-headed woman.” That just never would have occurred to me, in a million years.”

— Sarah Paulson

33. “I’ve never been on a show that’s run for more than a season.”

— Sarah Paulson

34. “I’m sporting some really blonde hair because I live in Hollywood and I’m an actress.”

— Sarah Paulson

35. “If I had my druthers, I would be working in all different mediums, forever.”

— Sarah Paulson

36. “Sometimes I think on television, you use maybe a tenth of what you are able to do. So it’s nice to go, ‘Well, I’m gonna take two months and reinvest in acting and storytelling.’ You don’t get to do that on television.”

— Sarah Paulson

37. “My great love is the stage because I do feel like it’s the place where, if you’re lucky and everything is firing in the right way, you have the greatest shot at being successful. I don’t mean by getting great reviews, but I mean by finding the core fo the person that you’re playing.”

— Sarah Paulson

38. “I have been sitting around waiting for an opportunity to get to do something that matters for so long. Not just that matters in the world, which I think that season, in particular, had a very important meaning for a lot of people, but for me, as an actress.”

— Sarah Paulson

39. “I like that feeling in your brain when you’ve got seven things that you’re holding in one moment-you heard that person cough, you heard that person laugh, you’re also saying your line, you’re also listening to the person who’s talking to you.”

— Sarah Paulson

40. “I’ve always really made my living in television. Television has always been so good to me.”

— Sarah Paulson