Carla Gugino quotes:

My favorite thing is to have a big dinner with friends and talk about life.

Sucker Punch' is a big girl power movie.

I always think a good sports movie is emblematic in the same way that a great Greek tragedy really has a certain kind of structure, or a Shakespearean play if you're looking at a comedy or a tragedy, is that these are the heights and depths of human emotion.

I feel like I'm the only person - or woman, at least - who hasn't read 'Fifty Shades of Grey.

I feel like I'm the only person - or woman, at least - who hasn't read 'Fifty Shades of Grey.'

I'm a sensualist. My two main indulgences are dark chocolate and massages.

When my friends have a health concern, they call me. I've always been a vitamin taker. I also take digestive enzymes and antioxidants, and supplements that help with the thyroid and adrenals for my time-zone changes.

Unfortunately, 'chick flick' has become a term to describe most movies that I don't even like. They're these movies that, yes, have women in them but they really don't reflect who women are, and there's something kind of silly or shallow or gossipy about them.

When my friends have a health concern, they call me. Ive always been a vitamin taker. I also take digestive enzymes and antioxidants, and supplements that help with the thyroid and adrenals for my time-zone changes.

It's not often that the idea of continuing something for a potentially long period of time sounds exciting to me, because I really am a gypsy by nature.

I like being the lead but I like being in an ensemble. There are different challenges and dilemmas with both. If you're carrying a film, there's a certain weight, but there are a lot of scenes to explore the character. When you're in an ensemble, you have to convey the entire character in a limited number of scenes.

For me, I never, never, from the moment I started acting, had a desire to be famous.

Personally, just as an actor, I love accents; they're fun.

I love doing serious movies for adults.

When a sports movie really works, it gets you on all levels, because the stakes are high. It's black and white. It's win or lose.

I have a very strong work ethic, and I'm very grateful for that. But I think there was a moment when I realized, "Oh, I can play a little as well."

I'm much more of a kid now than I was when I was a kid. I was the kind of kid who was valedictorian, a straight-A student. My mom used to say, "Please stop studying and get outside."

It is odd there are many movies with many men. But generally movies have one woman, or maybe the older woman and the younger girl.

We are all multidimensional and kind of have dual personalities. Everyone puts on different roles depending on what circumstances they're in without even noticing that they do that.

I'm intrigued by films that have a singular vision behind them. A lot of studio movies have ten writers by the time they're done. You have a movie testing 200 times, making adjustments according to various people's opinions. It's difficult to have an undistilled vision.

Well, first of all, I'm an incredibly gullible person - I'm so bad that when I said that to someone, my friend said, 'You know, 'gullible' isn't even in the dictionary.' And I said, 'Really?' As I was saying 'Really?' I will acknowledge that I then realized what was happening, but that's how bad I am.

My tendency as an actor is, when there's a certain energy, I feel a challenge to match it, to come up to that plate and play on the same level.

You can't not be happy around penguins. You're unfortunately happy and cold but the happiness makes up for the coldness.

I find often in Hollywood there are many people who play themselves really beautifully. And certain parts are not that dissimilar from who you are as a person. And there are other parts where you would like to think that you have nothing in common with those characters, but you probably do have more than you think.

I was a really, really serious kid. And a really kind of controlling kid. Like I had things that, now, people would say are like - there's a name for many disorders as we know - but I would say, "If I pick this rubber band, then this will happen." It was that kind of want to control things, which I think all kids have to some extent.

One of the things I really love about TV is this symbiotic relationship you can get between the writers and the actors, and the characters start to come to life because you start to collaborate.

I think I'm always trying to subvert conventions, and sometimes it's more successful than others.

I find often in Hollywood there are many people who play themselves really beautifully. And certain parts are not that dissimilar from who you are as a person.

I think that there's a tendency for actors who play strong women to have them take on all the worst characteristics of men, to become cold and detached and hardened.

Sexuality is one of the biggest parts of who we are.

I played the mom in Spy Kids when I was, like, 27. So it was ridiculous. But [Robert Rodriguez] was like, "You know what? If we do our job right, no one will question it." And nobody did.

She's a (lesbian), but with a body like that she could get any man she wants.

I feel that's the richest gift that's ever been given to me: I get to do what I love. And it's a really brutal business, and no matter how successful you are you hear "No" more than "Yes."

My father and my mother separated when I was two.

I'm a huge Wong Kar-Wai fan.

I'll always take an artistic endeavor over a career move.

I think that once somebody sees something, or feels it in the consciousness of society, it starts to allow change for other people.

I've joked that I would have either become schizophrenic or an actress, but as an actress you can do both.

I think maybe because I moved a lot in my childhood, I'm a little bit of a gypsy by nature.

One of the most important things for an actor is to observe humanity.

You know, I used to be made fun of as a kid for being really articulate; it was sort of like a strange thing.

I do think that's one of the reasons that acting appealed to me so much: the idea of letting go of control in a controlled environment. Being able to go through the range of intense emotions and jump off the cliff, metaphorically, but in a creative way, and in a way where the structure was really solid.

I can pretty much take care of myself; I don't walk around with much fear.

I think you always have to go as an artist with instinct, I really do.

I always feel like I want to work with people who raise my game, and I can do the same for them, and we can jump off the cliff together.

I'm fiercely protective of my privacy.

As an actor, you're naked emotionally; you're revealing yourself emotionally.

I kind of knew it wasn't going to be until my 30s that I really hit my stride as an actor.

I always had challenges when I was younger, because I looked so young but sounded older.

I was the person who did academics until the middle of the day, then went on auditions. I think there was a moment later in my life where I was like, "What am I doing? Why am I so serious?" .

I generally make a sort of playlist for my iPod for whatever project I'm doing.

What I love about him [Robert Rodriguez] is that he understands that actors are transformational. It's a natural instinct to ask people to do what you've seen them do before. Until you see someone do something new, you don't know what they can.

I don't have a favorite genre. I mean, I always sort of base it on instinct. And it does seem to be that after I finish something that is very dramatic, I end up inevitably wanting to do a comedy or something like that.

I think the scariest thing to me is to think that somebody would only associate me with one character and that that's all that I would get to play.

As a creative person, you need to sort of spread your wings and try different things out because each one really does inform the other.

The interesting thing with acting, actually, is that you get to be so many different people that you get to do so much research on so many different things that I've learned so much about brain surgery and about astrophysicist-type of things and traveling to amazing parts of the world.

I always wanted to be one of those people who were good at many, many things, but from a very early age, I fell in love with acting.

There is something in these moments of crisis that is really extraordinary about humanity and human beings' resilience and the way in which everyone naturally comes together. I think you see the best in people in those moments for better or for worse and you find your best self.

I started acting when I was 13, so acting has been, with great fortune, my job since I could get a job.

It's interesting how when you walk into a room in LA there's a sense of what you walk in, as is sort of what you can do. So I spent a lot of time choosing different things to hopefully show people that maybe that's not the case.