Mary Lynn Rajskub Quotes

Ever since I was a little girl music was my escape and it was something that I did and was a huge part of me; aside from what my grades were in school. It was something that was truly mine.

If you were to say to me that I couldn't paint, I would write. If I couldn't write, I would be a set designer. As long as I'm creating something, I'm happy.

I'm an escapist kind of writer.

Everybody has ideas. The vital question is, what do you do with them? My rock musician sons shape their ideas into music. My sister takes her ideas and fashions them into poems. My brother uses his ideas to help him understand science. I take my ideas and turn them into stories.

The only thing in life that really gives me any peace is just being lost in the process of creating something, whether it's the film or painting and drawing, which has been a big part of my life, for a long time.

Making movies was more a reaction to not being chosen for sports. Other kids were out there playing at whatever; I was off making something blow up and filming it, or making a mould of my sister's head using alginating plaster.

I developed this fantasy world. I found that that was much more fun and more interesting and exciting than real life was to me. Then, once I got the guitar going when I was a teenager, I set sail for the direction I've been in my whole life.

We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay.

I had very literal parents and I wanted to survive with metaphor and art, and there was a real sense of shame around it.

As long as I can remember, I've always loved to draw. But my interest in drawing wasn't encouraged very much.

Right now music is more my outlet than acting, but I'm waiting for that one satisfying role.

I think it's much richer and much more fun to be an artist than to be anything else. I can't think of a better life than acting.

I have to go someplace where I can soak myself in a creative atmosphere.

Not to get overly psychological about this, but it's probably why I became an actress in the first place: for that kind of freedom and refuge, as well as for the fact that I just love acting so much.

In my perfect world, I go off and make films, and then come home to my farm.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

I think when I was about 6 or 7, I would have said I wanted to be an actor and an artist.

It's head and heart. I like to feed both. I always wanted to be an actor. But the cultural-intellectual side of things has always excited me. I wouldn't want to let it go.

I love being a mom. But there's a certain kind of tedium to your life when your kid is young. Writing allows you to wander when your kid is napping in a crib ten feet away. So that's the great joy of writing fiction for me.

I think of fiction as the highest calling. I'm kind of addicted to it. It's the thing that has gotten me through all the hard points in my life.

Nothing about it interested me. Or about anything else, except making up stories. If literacy weren't so nearly universal, God knows what I'd be. A drain on the State, I shouldn't wonder.

I started writing when I started acting professionally because, with acting, there's so much time when you're not working, and there's so much rejection and so little you have control of. Writing is something that you can do, and no one can tell you not to.

My show is my statement. What I have to say is on the screen. My life is my own. I don't want to talk about my private self. Why should I?

I guess as a kid, I was always creative, and I was involved in music, like piano and violin and choir, so I always knew - I always knew that I wanted to do something that would allow me to be who I am. Generally, that was creatively, imaginatively.

I started making houses for ants because I thought they needed somewhere to live. Then I made them shoes and hats. It was a fantasy world I escaped to where my dyslexia didn't hold me back and my teachers couldn't criticize me. That's how my career as a micro-sculptor began.