Jodie Foster quotes:

It's an interesting combination: Having a great fear of being alone, and having a desperate need for solitude and the solitary experience. That's always been a tug of war for me.

Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock do romantic comedies. I do dark dramas. I do these movies well.

I make dark dramas, movies about people living in desperate fear who then overcome that fear and find a heroic side to themselves.

I spent a lot of time not in school, so I didn't have deep relationships with kids my own age.

All the movies that I make in some ways have to be the story of my life. There are different chapters in my life.

I do almost all my movies in French. I dub them.

I had a prodigious life, living in a grown-up world when I was a child. But I think my abilities were about perceptiveness, and they were about examining psychology and examining people and relationships.

I think every movie changes me and is life changing, especially movies you direct.

It's very hard for me to get a new car. It's really hard for me to get a new house. It's really hard for me to move on from the things that give me stability.

I saw leaving college as an opportunity to do something different with my life. I always thought that becoming an academic was going to be my path.

I think anybody over 30 plays parents because it happens in your thirties and so that's kind of a natural progression. But I'm definitely drawn to it. It's probably the most intense, passionate thing that happens to you as you get older.

I feel at various times in my life that I've been at a point where I had to choose between a death sentence and a life sentence. And I want to live. What do I do to live? What do I do to be vital? And the answer is always creativity. The answer is always art.

I will always love psychology, and the basis of psychology is family.

Knowing what paint a painter uses or having an understanding of where he was in the history of where he came from doesn't hurt your appreciation of the painting.

I want to be inspiring to myself, to my kids, my family, and my friends.

I love the way L A. leaves you alone. I can go home, read all day, and nobody bugs me.

I didn't have any ambition to produce big mainstream popcorn movies.

I don't have a burning desire to act, strangely enough. I don't know that if I hadn't been an actor as a young person, I don't know that I ever would have chosen this because it's not really my personality.

I like dramas. I've always liked dramas. And I'm a pretty light person. I don't consider myself a very dramatic person. But I do like doing that onscreen.

I make movies about people in spiritual crisis because it's a way for me to spend the time, the energy, the focus and the obsession to come to terms with my own spiritual crisis.

You develop a third eye where you kind of know where they are in a room at all times but no matter how vigilant you are as a parent, at some point, you'll look around a room and can't find them and there's a searing pain that goes through your body.

I love European movies and I kind of grew up on European films.

I don't like it when reviews aren't about the movie. When they're about how much money somebody made, or who they're sleeping with, or if they got the job via some connection, or about how Fox is putting X amount of dollars into it.

Boys are easy. I mean, there are just a lot of bruises when they're young. With boys, you get a lot of accidental jabs in the eye and stepping on your feet, and those tantrums they cause when they don't want to leave the toy store.

Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable.

I don't know if I see myself as really an action hero, but I like doing physical movies and I like doing movies where the writing is very lean.

As an actor, I'm always playing solitary characters. But as a director, I'm always making ensemble movies, which focus on lots of people's lives and how they intertwine.

I guess I've played a lot of victims, but that's what a lot of the history of women is about.

In a weird way, that's the beauty of being an actor. You get to live out things that you're afraid of, and you get to say, 'Well, maybe I can get to the end of it and survive it intact and I can be the hero of my own story.' It's kind of a way of exorcising fear.

I'm really not a clothes person. To me, that's just work. It's the thing I hate to do the most. I don't want to be judged in that way.

Every movie changes you. The process of making a film changes you.

Casting is a long process for me. I take a lot of time.

Every movie that I've had to really knock down the door for has been an enormous success for me. Not just like a financial success but a real personal success.

But now I really don't want to work unless I really, really care about a project.

I love more than anything looking at a movie scene by scene and seeing the intention behind it.

I love more than anything looking at a movie scene by scene and seeing the intention behind it. It allows you to really appreciate the hand of the filmmaker.

I don't direct so that I can have an identity and so I can go on to CGI movies. I had a big identity as an actor, and that's not what I'm looking for from directing. Directing is a whole different goal.

I was one of those avid moviegoers as a kid, and we didn't have video, so we went to see everything five times. I went to see every foreign film playing in my town. As times went on, I watched a lot less films. I have a different film school now. My film school now is my life experience.

By the first week of shooting, you know exactly where your film is heading based on the psychology of your director.

I think I'm drawn to films more as a director with a directorial mind even as an actor. I make movies to make the films, not to act.

I think an artist's responsibility is more complex than people realize.

I prefer to commit 100 per cent to a movie and make fewer films, because it takes over your life.

I fantasize about having a manual job where I can come home at night, read a book and not feel responsible for what will happen the next day.

There are conscious reasons and unconscious reasons why I pick something. You know, I have to be moved by the story and usually that means it has to touch me in some kind of personal place.

My kids are young and my life with them is really stimulating and really full and significant.

Well, I certainly was exposed to and learned to appreciate the work of great directors early on. As a kid, my mother used to take me to see really interesting arty films in Los Angeles.

I don't know why people think child actresses in particular are screwed up. I see kids everywhere who are totally bored. I've never been bored a day in my life.

I wish people could get over the hang-up of subtitles, although at the same time, you know, that's kind of why I'm kind of pro dubbing.

It's hard to get personal films off the ground, and it's hard developing them.

My definition of a friend is somebody who adores you even though they know the things you're most ashamed of.

When I was growing up, books took me away from my life to a solitary place that didn't feel lonely. They celebrated the outcasts, people who sat on the margins of society contemplating their interiors. . . Books were my cure for a romanticized unhappiness, for the anxiety of impending adulthood. They were all mine, private islands with secret passwords only the worthy could utter.

I think Anna and the King is a look at Asia from the Asian perspective, reflecting the Asian experience, which is very rare.

Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from.

How could you ask me to believe in God when there's absolutely no evidence that I can see? I do believe in the beauty and the awe-inspiring mystery of the science that's out there that we haven't discovered yet, that there are scientific explanations for phenomena that we call mystical because we don't know any better.

Being an artist is a way of saying, I am here, and this is what I stand for.

Taxi Driver' was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I didn't become a weirdo and squawk like a chicken.

You guys might be surprised but I am not Honey Boo Boo Child.

As I've said before, and I still hold to, I truly am the most boring person alive. And if there was a great investigation to be found at the end of the resume, it would be, the most boring person alive.

I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago in the stone age

But the reason I became, why I wanted to be in the business was because there was Midnight Cowboy.

I'm interested in directing movies about situations that I've lived, so they are almost a personal essay about what I've come to believe in.

So, yes, there's nothing I love more than listening to directors talk about their movies.

There are lots of futurists that spend their whole life trying to figure out who we're going to be in 40, 50, 60, 100 years. That's the great thing about science fiction.

Part of me longs to do a job where there's not a gray area.

There are 400 billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone. If just one out of a million of those had planets, and just one in a million of those had life, and just one out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there.

Love and respect are the most important aspects of parenting, and of all relationships.

Otherness is a big thing for me. I'm always drawn to characters that live lives that I couldn't lead.

Ninety-five percent of women's experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive... women didn't go to Vietnam and blow things up. They are not Rambo.

If you had been a public figure from the time you were a toddler, if you'd had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, than maybe to you might value privacy above all else. I have given everything up there from the time that I was three-years old. That's reality show enough, don't you think?

Now, apparently, Im told that every celebrity is expected to honor the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance, and a prime-time reality show.

Actors become actors because they loved entertaining their family by putting on the lampshade and dancing around as a kid, ... That's not my personality. For me, the fun part of making movies is seeing it as a director sees it. I like the architecture of movies. I like knowing what's coming and working to set that up

I cannot believe in God when there is no scientific evidence for the existence of a supreme being and creator.

I suppose that's my one little secret, the secret of my success.

What the digital age has offered us, in terms of connectivity and transparency, is that all of these people from weird places in the world are all talking to each other, at four in the morning, and are sharing ideas. There's more openness than has ever been known, so that's a good thing.

I don't see anyone walking around with a puppet on his hand in real life. Puppet therapy is very common for children. It's not something that adults take on.

When I go into the stores, I pet the saddles. Until security comes and takes me away.

Being twenty-something is all about taking it in: eating it, drinking it, and spitting out the seeds later. It's about being fearless, and stupid, and dangerous, and unfocused, and abandoned. It's about being in it, not on top of it

As time goes on, I will play characters who get older: I don't want to be some Botoxed weirdo.

I had to take my makeup off at work every night. I wasn't allowed to do it at home because my mom said that when your work day is done, you're done with work.

People are always surprised when I say that I'm an atheist.

Adolescence is a tough one to be a child actor.

I was never the ingenue or the pretty girlfriend of Tom Cruise in a movie. I didn't have that career, so I don't have to compete on that level.

I don't like the outside world to intrude when I'm making a film. I like to either see my family or work, but I don't like to go out.

'Silence Of The Lambs' was not something people expected me to do.

I'm a technician. I don't go for the get-into-the-role stuff. I read the lines and play the scenes.

The world is littered with movies about people that are depressed that either did not come out or are not successful.

I have, in some ways, saved characters that have been marginalized by society by playing them - and having them still have dignity and still survive, still get through it.

I'd always need a creative outlet. But sometimes, I do fantasize what my life would be like if I weren't famous.

I like to be in a different place when I make a movie so that I can't really focus on anything else, and that is your world.

I had a certain career as an actor that I think was quite personal as well, and had a lot of integrity, but I wasn't writing my own things or directing my own movies.

I wish that I spoke more languages. I speak a couple languages, but not well enough to really dub myself. French is really the only one, and it's a difficult thing.

Any actor working a long time should know how a shot is set up, where to place themselves, how to handle the lines. I'm a member of the crew, like the best boy, the electrician. What I'm good at is making eyes at the camera.

If I make two movies my entire life, and they're two movies that - whether they make a lot of money or two people go to see them - they speak of me, then I consider them incredibly successful. I don't need to be Steven Spielberg.

With 'Taxi Driver,' I had this eureka moment. I realized that acting could be much more than what I had been doing. I had to build a character that wasn't me.

I'd like to be Dakota Fanning when I get young.

Acting just happens to be my skill, but I think I would probably be just as happy being a technician or entering into the film business in some other way.

I'm kind of a chatterbox and I talk really fast.

I did a couple of plays in junior high school, maybe high school, and then I did a play in college.

If I fail, at least I will have failed my way.

I'd prefer not to act in the film I'm directing. I think, though, as an actor, you do learn how to turn things on and off quickly and kind of compartmentalize. You learn to accommodate the camera and the other actors, to notice where the boom is and where you mark is, and be able to repeat something a few times.

I've always had this idea that I wanted movies to make people better not worse.

Being understood is not the most essential thing in life.

Where I have problems is when I am in the midst of doing something that I am completely focused on, and then I am asked to buy shoes or something.

Look, it's terrible, I know, but weakness really, really bugs me, to the point that if there is a wounded bird on the sidewalk, I look at it and I go: I think I'll just kick it.

Privacy. Someday, in the future, people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was.

Going back and forth between the press and something like The Crucible must be really crazy and intense.

I'm an atheist. But I absolutely love religions and the rituals. Even though I don't believe in God. We celebrate pretty much every religion in our family with the kids. They love it, and when they say, 'Are we Jewish?' or 'Are we Catholic?' I say, 'Well, I'm not, but you can choose when you're 18. But isn't this fun that we do seders and the Advent calendar?'

I've worked with Neil Jordan, who I really adore. We did The Brave One [2007] together.

There is nothing more beautiful than finding your course as you believe you bob aimlessly in the current. And wouldn't you know that your path was there all along, waiting for you to knock, waiting for you to become. This path does not belong to your parents, your teachers, your leaders, or your lovers. Your path is your character defining itself more and more every day.

There is no doubt that each of us is born an individual. Why is it then that so many of us die carbon copies?

The best reason to make a film is that you feel passionately about it.

It was a weird moment in my life and a weird experience [doing a theater]. It made me think, "Gee, I don't know if I ever want to do this again." And I love theater. I love going. I love the experience of theater. But I am not sure it's for me.

I've got that Irish thing going on. Lots of Irish in my background.

~I used to think, What if there's an interesting movie and it conflicts with the boys going to a new school for the first time?... Well, I didn't anticipate that was going to be about a two-second dilemma. I didn't know the choices would be so easy to make.~

We think, "If I have more money, I am more valuable. If I make more money, I am more valuable." It's all sort of wound up with this problem that humans have with their failure.

You hold all of our futures in your hands. So you better make it good.

There's absolutely no sort of acknowledgment or reward for this - except for the intangible of my kids growing up to be wonderful people.

I don't know if you've ever seen some of the Sidney Lumet movies, like Dog Day Afternoon [1975] or Network [1976]. They're real events that happen in real time, and there are all of these different characters experiencing the same thing in different parts of the movie ... I am so bad at explaining my films. But it's in the world of finance and the world of media, and how they connect. It was a big undertaking. A big, mainstream movie, which stars Julia Roberts and George Clooney. But for me, it's really just a small story about character and people.

The movies I made when I was 14 or 15, I have a hard time looking at those. Those were the awkward years. I don't know if anybody can look at something they did when they were 14 and not wince.

When I think about what part of my college experience came back in my work experience, I feel like it was learning how to read deeper, learning how to keep filling the movie up with more and more resonance.