Mary McDonnell Quotes

I share personal things about myself in the context of my interviews and in 'It's Messy' - but that's 20 percent of my life.

It is important to express oneself... provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience.

I think you have to ask questions that are scary to ask, and you cannot apologize for that, and you cannot worry what anyone else thinks about your journey.

Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

The essential lesson I've learned in life is to just be yourself. Treasure the magnificent being that you are and recognize first and foremost you're not here as a human being only. You're a spiritual being having a human experience.

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

'Feeling Good' is a peek into my life through song.

Do stuff that is true to your own experiences.

We've all got stories to tell that no one else knows. We've all got this truly unique experience of being. So I would say cultivate that, because then also you're cultivating something which is very natural to you.

Growing up in postwar Japan has made me the person I am, but it is not why I do the work I do. It is a very personal thing - everything comes from inside.

What we are, the experiences we've had, come to the surface.

I am a collection of thoughts and memories and likes and dislikes. I am the things that have happened to me and the sum of everything I've ever done. I am the clothes I wear on my back. I am every place and every person and every object I have ever come across. I am a bag of bones stuck to a very large rock spinning a thousand miles an hour.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

I try to say something about the human condition whenever I can when I'm lucky.

Fighting for identity is something that is very much in my life.

Being true to yourself really means being true to all the complexities of the human spirit.

Josie needed more of a personality than what the cartoon had to offer.

My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb.

What's the greater risk? Letting go of what people think - or letting go of how I feel, what I believe, and who I am?

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.

As I experience life and go through things, that's what I write about.

When I was younger, I thought I was too young to really be personal. I thought that what I was feeling and thinking might be half-baked.

I come out of real life.