Maggie Gyllenhaal Quotes

I couldn't have children, I tried to for years. I've never been pregnant in my life. When I was a girl and fooling around I was scared to death I'd get pregnant, and then when I got married and wanted to have children I couldn't have any. But I don't miss it. I did for awhile, but I realize that I am everybody's mother.

Something happens to a woman when she can't reproduce. I've not had to walk that path, but I can only imagine when your organs don't work and how that could make you feel.

I don't write songs that don't affect me on some level, because I figure if I am not moved by it, if its not something that I have a longing to celebrate or to be reminded of, if it doesn't affect me, then how can I possibly think it is going to affect somebody else. My touchstone is write something that matters.

We tried - we tried for a year, and we tried different methods and different - and I had in vitro and it didn't work. It didn't stick. It didn't - didn't produce a baby at all.

If the picture speaks to me, if it tells me something about myself, then I want it. Then I have to have it.

I think if you talk to anybody who would like to have had children... I mean, you look at families all the time and you see there is something there that you don't have.

Usually people have gone through years of in vitro, just trying. The dilemma that faces infertile couples right now in America, there's so many of them. That's why - you know that's why I started talking about it, so that they didn't hear just the terrible stories.

I was happy to carry on without children because I was completely immersed in my work and my career. I only heard the clock ticking in my late 30s, and when my mother Marion died the year I turned 40 it hit me with such a force that we ended up having IVF, which turned out to be unsuccessful.

I've had other friends who had such a burning desire to have children: they have this biological ticking clock. I don't know what happened to mine. Nobody ever wound it up.

I really want to make something that makes people think. I love that movie 'Tiny Furniture' that Lena Dunham made. I just love that movie, and I laugh at that movie a lot, but I also felt a lot too. I'm just inspired by people like that.

When I first read Helen Weinzweig's 'Basic Black with Pearls' several years ago, I emerged in the sort of daze that happens when a book seems to ferret out your most secret thoughts and hopes. Since then, I've described the book to others as an 'interior feminist espionage novel.'

My rational mind knows I am blessed. So many women - some of whom I've interviewed over the years - endure infertility and childlessness.

I simply find that as a songwriter, my goal is to try to move people. And I feel that before I can move other people, I have to genuinely be able to move myself.

Nine million Americans a year, that we know of, struggle with infertility.

Those of us who make films try to make something that we're feeling and that we would like. Then we just hope an audience responds the same way. It's very important to have the electrical circuit made, but I don't have control over how people feel when they flip the switch. So the whole idea of marketing research and test screenings is just foreign to me.

In the finished article, the only thing that is important is whether it moves you or not. There is nothing else that is important at all.

I'd like to do something that hits close to home.

In fact, my favorite Beatles song is "In My Life." And from that, you can gauge that my friends mean so much to me. I love John Lennon, so it's kind of like moody... There's a lot you can gauge from that. As insignificant as it seems, as an actor, it's an interesting way to approach a character.

You check the pregnancy test every month, and when it comes up negative it can start to wear on you

Anything I've not experienced I do not look to for a subject. I have to feel it.

Listening. That's what music is about. You hear it. And I'd listen to it and something would move me one way or another; and I would try and play it.

People are buying only one thing from you: the way the engagement (hiring you, working with you, dating you, using your product or service, learning from you) makes them feel.

Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.

My work is immaterial. It's not painting, it's not sculpture, it's emotions. I'm giving you something to experience yourself.

That’s why I make music. When I listen to my favorite music made by other people, that’s what it does to me. So as a musician, I’m just trying to do the same thing with music I make. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But when someone comes to me and says the music I’ve made has affected them emotionally, that’s the most gratifying part of my job.