Janel Moloney quotes:

The hardest thing about being an actor, for me, is that if you are the 0.00001% of individuals who wants to do it, you're a freak. And you're an assertive freak. Though actors are often shy, there's this tremendous assertive extroversion in you somewhere.

I think being a guest star on an ongoing TV show can be a nightmare, and I've done it a lot. You're walking into this family who's very comfortable where they are, and you have to jump on the train and be artificially comfortable. That's a very hard thing to do.

I played the character knowing that she was knocked down, 100 percent, dead-in-front-of-a-bus in love with her boss. Every scene, I did not care if it was about taxes or about, you know, getting rid of the penny, it was all about me being in love with him.

At one point in my 20s, I was about to quit acting. I'd had a crappy couple of years and I was depressed. My mom said, 'Don't give up! You'll be so mad at yourself.'

I think the best way for me to go into auditions psychologically was to say, 'You're not going to get it. This is the only acting experience you're going to have with this material.'