Tatiana Maslany quotes:

I'd say I am more of a comfort person. I have Adidas sneakers that are my favorite thing on the planet. Adidas high tops with black jeans and a fur hat that I love wearing. I love vintage shopping.

Trust your gut. You know yourself, so don't let somebody else tell you who you are.

I'm at the transition place myself, still playing high school girls but moving to a stage when I'm playing older roles and going to the places of stillness and wisdom and knowledge and weight. It's exciting and scary.

Auditions are not a natural environment, and you feel judged, even though everyone is just excited to find the right person.

I was a dancer from about the age of four, so I was always performing and forcing my parents to watch my brother and I do 'Jesus Christ Super Star' in the living room. My first step was community theater, and then I started to do films.

I love hip-hop; I love Sleigh Bells. I also love classical music and musical theater.

My mom taught me German before I knew English. And I went to French immersion school.

I think there's something really freeing about improv, that it's a collective, creative, in-the-moment piece. That's really exciting and really frustrating, because it's there and gone. There's an amazing interaction with the audience that happens because they are very much another scene partner.

I'm attracted to stories that excite my imagination, stories that, as I'm reading the script, I feel it, I can see it, I can hear the characters. I'm attracted to characters that are real, that tap into something inside me that I haven't explored yet.

My brothers and I always did improv stuff in our basement with our friends; we're super nerds, and that was our way of spending a Friday night.

I fell in love with 'Star Trek' after J. J. Abrams's movie. I'm so into that.

That's my favorite kind of television, where it's not wrapped up in a pretty little bow. It's like life. You deal with one thing in your life, 500 others rear their head.

Comedy scares me a lot. I feel like it's way harder than drama. I think my safety net is definitely drama, and I would love to kind of be able to be able to push into the comedy world and do something kind of like a Christopher Guest kind of style show. That, to me, is my kind of comedy. Like, Ricky Gervais comedy. That's my kind of thing.

Some of my favorite shows are ones where the characters are vile and human and flawed. That's what makes me want to keep watching a show, not writers telling me how to feel about characters.

There's something really unique about 'Orphan Black' is that it has a lot of female leads, so it's about a lot of women's stories, but it's not women's stories in terms of trying to find a guy or keep a guy; it's about entirely other things.

I transitioned into theater and acting when I was about 9, community theater and musicals, being, like, chorus-kid-number-78 or whatever. But I just loved it. As a kid you just crave attention, and early on I just felt it was so cool and fun to play around and have people clap for me. But eventually I grew up and fell deeper into it.

It's always been my dream to just continually do really cool indie movies - character-driven stuff.

Those darker sides, the things that we don't want to admit about ourselves - that's what excites me.

Dance has always been a really important thing for me, so being able to physically express the characters through music and dance is like another layer to things.

I grew up in Canada, man - we all had rinks in our backyards because we'd ice down the grass with a hose and build a skating rink.

I have trouble sleeping, at the end of the night. There's a lot of stimulus and my brain is processing a lot of different arcs and personalities. I'm always processing things, so I don't sleep.

It's wild to be seen differently and have more visibility, but it's rewarding.

I love people, watching people interact. It's a lot of psychology. We learn about ourselves by watching other people's lives on the screen.

I try to get roles that challenge me in what I can do and who I think I can portray. For me, it's about creating characters with really fascinating stories, because that's what I like to watch on TV.

I'm an actor, and I like having attention, I guess. There's a reason I like being on stage. There's a reason I like being in front of a camera. It's that interaction.

We do long-form-style improv. Our focus was characters and telling a long arc story over about an hour and a half. It was closer to a one-act play than one-off sketches.

I wanted to get everything right. I was super nerdy and academic. I got so much satisfaction out of getting good grades.

I would love to work with Gena Rowlands. I just don't know in what capacity. I'd play her daughter or granddaughter, or whatever. I would just love to work with her, in whatever capacity.

So much of how you look at yourself in the mirror reflects how you feel about yourself, and how you comport yourself.

I haven't really done a lot of comedy. It's something that terrifies me.

I was on the improv team in high school, and after I graduated, I joined an improv company that had been established 10 years prior to me getting there. They did longform improv, and I fell in love with it. It's acting, character creation, collaborative, artistic expression and comedy - and it's scary. It was a big rush.

I loved filming in Morocco; it was amazing. I'd never been anywhere like that. The culture was phenomenal. I was so blown away by the spirit of that country.

Hype is wonderful when it happens, and you should capitalize on it. But you shouldn't bank on it being the thing that will take you to the next step. Because it's fleeting. The blah-blah-blah goes away, but you're still there.

Clothing and makeup and hair and all of that so much indicates the kind of person you are inside and the person you are presenting on the outside. Sometimes they are in conflict, and sometimes they are the same. That psychology of the exterior informing the interior is just so interesting.

It's always been my dream to just continually do really cool indie movies, character-driven stuff. I would love to do more theater on a larger scale. I'm just excited for the next thing that comes along that I'm salivating over. I think a little more guerrilla would be really exciting to me.

Music is like a lifeblood - it changes the way I move; it changes the way I feel about myself. The way I walk into the room is different depending on the song I was just listening to.

I was in a Nativity play as a kid. Back then, I played the donkey.

Robert de Niro has always been fascinating to me. And if John Cazale were still alive, that would be a man I'd love to work with. I'm a big fan of Paul Thomas Anderson's films - I would be honored to work with him. I think he's a brilliant director, and he gets such compelling stories out of his actors and out of his crew.

My mom's a translator, my dad's a woodworker; that's the world I grew up in, that's the world I'm most comfortable in. The whole idea of Hollywood or any of that other stuff that unfortunately goes along with film, that wasn't part of my upbringing, thankfully.

Orphan Black' allows for people to have debates and theories and allegiances to different characters - to trust characters and hate other characters - but it doesn't tell you who is good or bad or right or wrong. That's the most exciting storytelling, in my book.

I think Amy Poehler and Tina Fey have done so much for women in comedy in the sense that they've normalized it. You don't think, 'I'm going to watch that comedy starring a woman,' you think, 'I'm going to watch that funny show.' They refuse to play the foils for men, or be reduced to the butt of every joke, and I love that about both of them.

Something like 'Rust and Bone' would be a dream. Very pared down. 'Orphan Black' is such a challenge. I just need something that isn't as full-on intense as that.

It's the reason we go to films and watch television: to escape the mundane nature of life and see another world and see ourselves in that other world. I think that's what sci-fi does so well.

You're hot for two seconds, and you're struggling to get work again. If it were easy, I don't think that's a good place for an artist to work from.

How you go about moving within the world you live in says so much about who you are.

I'm incredibly close to my family. I have two younger brothers; they're both artists and actors, and their work and the way they see the world inspires me.

As a kid, I wanted to be a boy because I equated that with strength. There's a problem with that. It's only growing into my own womanhood that I realize how warped that is that I was attributing strength to male qualities.

As an actor, you're listening to the other person and always trying to be present and take everything they're giving you, but when they're not there, you have to produce that yourself.

As artists, you always want to push yourself. There's always new territory.

Film has always been where my heart is.

For me, comedians are like the epitome for everything great, and they terrify me. I just want to be them. I want to be like them.

For me, comedy literally is way more terrifying than doing drama, so it's always about stretching what I think I can do and putting myself out there in different context.

Go with your gut every single time. It's never, ever wrong. Even if feels like everybody else is telling you that you need to do this or do that. Your gut is your artist and who you are as a person and what makes you special, and what makes you an interesting performer. Never try to be something you're not.

Going back is a nice way to give definition to each of the characters because they are so vastly different. I would never want them to get blended together.

Going to set, every day, and working with the incredible actors I get to work with is fulfilling. I've been doing this since I was nine years old, so it's always been something that I've been passionate about. It's always fed me.

Have fun, be yourself, enjoy life and stay positive.

I like 'Futurama.' That's kind of the only thing that's my sci-fi thing, although I was big into zombies for a time.

I love nerdy work. I love writing notes. I try to go back, as much as I can, to feed what happens and why they do what they do.

I started out as a dancer as a kid; I've been dancing since I was 4. So performing was always part of what I was.

I started out as a dancer as a kid; I've been dancing since I was 4. So, performing was always part of what I was. I don't know if it I enjoyed the response I got from people or if I liked having an audience, but there's something in me that wanted to perform.

I think being idle is quite hard for me to do.

I'm a huge 'Futurama' fan, so that's my closest sci-fi tendency.

I'm an actor and I like having attention. There's a reason I like being on stage and in front of the camera, and it's that interaction.

I'm excited to work on something where I have a bit more time with it, to explore one personality. That's definitely exciting to me.

I'm fascinated with psychology, and with why a person walks the way they walk or why they walk into a room the way they do or why we are the way we are, and it's not exclusive to the psychology of a character.

I'm running on adrenalin when we're shooting. It's non-stop. As soon as I have time to sit down, then I fall asleep.

I'm so inspired and stimulated by the work that it doesn't ever feel like work.

I've learned a lot about the limits of what I can do, as an artist, or what I'm willing to do. It's a lot of responsibility to carry a show and to speak to people on different levels.

I've worked on shows where the lead actor doesn't know their lines, doesn't care, and it affects everybody - the crew, the director, the other actors. It's definitely a responsibility.

Just to be on set with Amy Poehler, who's one of my heroes, was a total dream come true.

'Orphan Black' allows for people to have debates and theories and allegiances to different characters - to trust characters and hate other characters - but it doesn't tell you who is good or bad or right or wrong. That's the most exciting storytelling, in my book.

Sex isn't hard, but intimacy is terrifying.

Sometimes I'll go into a shop and speak in a different accent to see if I can pull it off. But then somebody will be like, 'Where did you say you were from again?' And then I panic, and my accent dissolves, and I pretend like I wasn't doing it in the first place.

The most bizarre demographics come up to me. Men in their 50s come up to me and are like, "Alison is my favorite. I hated her at first, and now I love her." I don't know what that says about people's psychology.

The way people love sci-fi is how I love cartoons.

There's something about music that makes me feel like a different person, that feels like an escape.

We're living in a world where the response is really instantaneous, even though it's delayed by a few months. It comes at you pretty fast.

You learn from the actors that you're working with.

Young women are now looking at me for cues. That's definitely been a responsibility. But I feel like I was ready to take on something like this because I wanted to be challenged and I wanted to be afraid, and that's definitely what it's done for me.

You're revealing something about yourself in a more exaggerated, more fleshed-out way, and it awakens something in you that maybe you didn't know you had.