Lauren graham quotes

Anyone can smile on their best day. I like to meet a man who can smile on his WORST.

I'm sure you've felt this way along the way: Yes, I got to do what I wanted to do. But it was much harder than I thought it was going to be, and it continues to be. You never get to a place that is a place of rest. I think that's OK. It's not bad - life is hard work!

Once again, I've been thwarted by the massive difference between my vision of the successful me and the me I'm currently stuck with.

It's great to have an acting job in the age of Reality TV.

I'd pay more just to hear proper English and have everyone keep their clothes on

Today is the day you have to start believing in yourself. No one can do it for you anymore.

I live with someone, actor Peter Krause, who didn't find an interest in being an actor until the very end of college. So my message is: There's so much freedom left. There's no ticking clock. It's just not true.

I feel real ownership in this show. I feel very invested in it. I care very much about it. I don't feel any more like a hired hand, you know? It's a strange feeling - I feel personally responsible for how the story goes. What happens. What the weaknesses are. And so in a way, some of the changes gave me an opportunity to have a voice in a different way.

You want the story to end when it's supposed to and not be squeezed for somebody's financial gain.

It's core to my beliefs now: Sometimes in being given a challenge, you're actually being given a real opportunity, and a lot of that is how you handle it. Do you feel sorry for yourself or do you think, All right! I'll see what I can make out of this? I've had that over and over. If I hang out in the disappointment, I'll just be disappointed all the time.

I've made out more this season on a family-friendly show than ever in my actual life.

Over and over in the play my character says, "I'm thirty-two years old," as if that should explain everything that's wrong in her life. I don't know what it's like to be thirty-two, but I can imagine. I imagine she means she's stuck in an in-between time, she's at an age that isn't a milestone but more of a no-man's-land, an age where she's feeling like her hopes are fading.

I'm nice, and I show up on time.

I am here to tell you there's nothing in people knowing you. There's actually a loss in that! Really, the reward in life is genuinely the day of work you have. It's not the name you're making for yourself or the clicks and likes - it's such an illusion.

Be truthful, say what you mean and mean what you say, don't ignore the given circumstances.

Nobody ever seems to want my advice about serious stuff. People will be like: 'Who made that sweater?' Or 'How did you get your hair so straight?' They don't to come to me for the relationship advice or deep stuff. In fact, my little sister actually hides from me.

It's also show business. It's not "show fun friends".

As I've gotten older, I've gotten more liberal, and my father is increasingly conservative. It's so shocking to me because I always thought we had the same politics. The day I realized we voted for different presidents, I practically fell out of my chair.

My mother had lived in London since I was little, so she never got to see my school plays and stuff.

Texting is not flirting, if you don't care about me enough to say the words than that's not love, I don't like it!

The thing you must really do in television is bring yourself to everything you do - you can't try to be anybody else.

If I had a normal job and had been moving up, I'd be management level now.

I could never have predicted the invention of streaming, the rerelease of the show Gilmore Girls on Netflix, and that people still wanted to hear about it. I do love how we came back to it, but it was never up to me. It won't be up to me this time, either. If it ended there, I would be sad, but I also like what we did.

I've dated people who I thought were going to be a big deal in my life, and I've also spent long periods by myself.

I'm gonna try to talk about this in a secular way, but where's the spirituality of just being a person? I think it contributes to this rise in bad manners and mean comments; people are being driven by seeking something that's just designed to keep them seeking something. I'm not reducing people in this age to phone-addicted dum-dums, but we have to remind ourselves to also study compassion and inner life as well.

Actors should ACT. Not sell perfume, or write cookbooks.

You may be sensitive inside, but what I see on the outside is a soldier.

When the creator of the show is gone, the actors end up being the people who have been there the longest.

Belly buttons are cool!

I was always torn between wanting whatever I pictured as a typical high school experience and that being just a part I wanted to play. I've written about this, but one of those typical high school experiences was drill team. Like, I just really wanted to wear a uniform and get on the bus and be part of this group. As an only child, the idea of blending in - and literally everyone being in sync and not standing out at all - felt like kind of a fun family thing.

I would rather be a person who struggled there than someone who had a great, easy time and then got out in the world and was like, "Wait a minute, I didn't get voted class president? What's going on?" You know, "popular" doesn't necessarily correlate to anything. "Popular" still has to get up at 7:00 in the morning and go to work and do something worthy too. There's no edge, really, that you get from being whatever was popular in school.

I personally was driven to be an actor for the love of telling a story. It was very closely linked to being a reader as a kid and being transported by literature and art. It had nothing - zero - to do with anything resembling fame.

I came from a Sorkin-like project in the sense that there was no freedom to change a line, which, in a weird way, is its own freedom because you're living within that structure and know this is what it is. You just adjust. Every project has its own personality.

Personally, all I ever want to be wearing are jeans.

All my references are 50 years old-when somebody shot J.R., you know? Oh my god, I'm 100!

I must work harder to achieve my goal of not seeking approval from those whose approval I'm not even sure is important to me.

We're all working hard, but so far away from what we actually want to be doing. We're all peering in at the window of a party we aren't invited to yet, a party we wouldn't know how to dress for, or what kind of conversation to make, even if we came as someone's guest.

I just don't know that a TV show demands a movie ending.

The thing I don't like on television is when somebody does something that makes absolutely no sense just for the shock of it.

I think there's more pressure to stand out in a way that is measurable externally. The fame culture is definitely way worse and weirder than it was when we were in high school.

Writing a memoir isn't particularly interesting to me. I'm not like Ellen [DeGeneres], where I can write, 'Water bottles--they're crazy!' and it's funny.

Like my dad, I have a Christmas party most years. I like to celebrate and see as many people as possible.

The best part of getting to do what you like is just doing it. That doesn't have to do with being famous or even successful or even powerful. I see people in life who are just doing a job and seem to be having a good time. And that's the trick.

There's nothing more important than a good story.

Well, it's more of a sane life to be part of an ensemble! I find that the work can be more specific too and I have to really make sure I know where I am in the story because I'm not in every scene.

I didn't grow up identifying with beauty. I grew up thinking I could be smart and funny - those are the things I got feedback on.

If you do have something you love to do, the fun part of the job is no different than what was fun about doing it in high school for no money. I thought there would be some greater reward in succeeding.

I remember feeling a huge amount of anxiety and worry and pressure. At that point I was headed into acting school. That was 100 percent the only thing I thought I wanted to do. But then I got through my first year of college, and I was, like, humming and rolling around, pretending to be a lion in acting classes at NYU and visiting our classmate Charlie Gregg at Harvard, where he was actually learning things. So I changed my mind: I decided I actually wanted a different kind of education, and that was an incredibly freeing idea.

The best you can hope for is a great collaborator.

Maybe I should sit. Plenty of people use sitting as a way to pass the time.

I would like to be part of a family, however that looks. Family is really important to me.

I love TV. I think I'd do a half-hour single-camera comedy.

All TV shows are basically part of the same storyline.

My biggest goal was - I thought, God, if I could just be a rep company member at the Arena Stage in Washington, D. C. and get to play a bunch of parts in a year! And now in my work everything is about promoting it. It's not about the doing of it! Everything is: You have to sell it, and they ask you to tweet about it or do photo shoots, even for the smallest job. There's an imbalance in terms of what is actually gratifying. The stuff that is gratifying is, like I said, the day of work and the doing of it.

I take the no-doughnut pledge, and then I break it.

Getting anywhere you want is hard work. In this photography culture, everything looks so amazing. But it's actually very hard to get to where anybody gets.

That's the thing that always stuck out to me - the idea that quantity becomes quality. I always took it to mean if you do anything enough, if you keep putting effort in, eventually something will happen, with or without you. You don't have to have faith when you start out, you just have to dedicate yourself to practice as if you have it.

Perspective is the most important thing to have in life.

I have to introduce the part of me that feels like a winner to the part of me convinced I’m a loser, and see if they can’t agree to exist somewhere closer to the middle.

Growing up an only child with a single parent is probably why I'm an actor.

I think what my hope is is that the only downside of having a steady job on television is, I think for all actors, there's a piece, there's some adrenaline, and part of the love of the job is not knowing what's coming next, and the variety.

Moving. Someone said this to me a long time ago, it's bhuddist saying, I think: 'There is no wasted effort'.

The parts for women, you're either like the quietly suffering wife or the wild girl.

I've spent a lot of time wondering, What's going to happen? What's going to happen? I try not to allow myself to do that much anymore. I think ive gotten more comfortable with the unknown.

These days I have to be extra nice in stores. It never fails that whenever I look as bad as I can possibly look or I am sort of cranky because the store is out of something, that is precisely the time when someone one will recognize me and say: 'I really like your show.'

Some people think my father was a spy, because of working for that government agency in Vietnam, but he can't find his car keys, much less keep a national secret.

None of my characters have really had jobs.

While I very much wanted to be in a relationship, I didn't want to be in the wrong one.

I definitely wanted to be an actor. I didn't want to be on TV, I didn't want to be famous, I didn't want to be anyone in particular; I just wanted to do it. I see young people now who look at magazines, or American Idol and their goal is to have that lifestyle - to have good handbags, or go out with cute guys from shows, or whatever. But I definitely wanted to be an actor.

As actors we always say that once the person in a scene gets what they want, the scene is over. It's resolved. But life is never resolved - you're always in the process.