Mary Elizabeth Winstead Quotes

Acting is a precarious business. I have had periods where I felt like I couldn't get arrested, but you have to see it as a long game.

It always amazed me - it still does - that people offer me work. And when the theater was my basic bread and butter, every time a show finished, I was convinced I would never work again.

I like to go for auditions. I enjoy that aspect of this job until I actually need a job, and then that becomes a problem. The worst thing is to build yourself up for a role and not get it, so now I'm just taking every day as it comes and trying not to rely on anything.

As an actor, you always feel like you're not going to work again. You're always unsure about how things are going to work out, and you start thinking you're going to just fade off into the distance.

As an actor, your life is constant ups and downs. My friends and I joke that when a job ends and nothing is lined up, you have nothing to do for the rest of your life. You just ride that wave.

I think there's so much that is out of our control as actors, and it's just really hard to market yourself in such a huge industry.

When I didn't work on TV, that was OK because I was doing lots of theatre but I did begin to panic a bit.

We don't often talk about the quarter-life crisis, but it is a real thing.

I think most actors will say they always feel like they'll never work again.

I've never lost that freelance mentality. You can't take a holiday because you're worried the work will dry up.

I don't like the feeling of being unhappy. I don't like the feeling of being unsure about myself, or uncertain with where something's going - I would rather turn away. I just can't feel like that ever again. It's just horrible.

There are such wonderful blessings in my life - I have this amazing baby, an amazing family, and I loved X Factor - all these moments of joy, and then these sharp drop-offs. I'd be awake, lying in bed, crying. There's these weird moments of misplaced anger I have.

I've always been really hard on myself. If I didn't book a job, I would cry.

Everybody gets paranoid about deselections. I do.

Most actors are lucky to ever get a job, period. I never forget that, because I have so many actor friends in L.A., and most of us barely ever work. And those of us that do, it's still only 60 days out of the year that we're actually on camera. It's an absurdly low number.

The cruelest thing you can do to a person who's living in panic is to offer him or her hope that turns out false. When the crash comes its intolerable.

The state of that man's mind who feels too intense an interest as to future events, must be most deplorable.

Part of me was saying if you say that she's alive, what would everybody think? What are you going to tell everybody who followed you, who you've inspired? What are you going to say? I was scared. That's the truth. I was just scared, and I didn't know what to do.

You’re optimistic one moment, only to be racked the next by the certainty that it will all fall to pieces. And in the end it does.

I want to hold onto this funny thing. God, it's gotten big on me. I don't know what it is. I'm so damned unhappy, I'm so mad, and I don't know why. I feel like I'm putting on weight. I feel fat. I feel like I'm saving a lot of things, and I don't know what. I might even start reading books.

If you ask any actor "What single thing would make you really, really happy?" Among the top five things they'd say is not having to audition anymore.

When you're a young actor you ring your agent every evening. It's not like when you're in Hollywood where you do one picture a year. You just hope you get a day on television.

Waiting for your answer is one of the most painful things I have ever been through. At least let me know whether or not I hurt you.

What's frustrating as an actor, when you want to work hard, you can only work once that phone rings and then you can only work until the production wraps. Then you have to find another job.

Cast between the extremes of happiness and misfortune, uncertainty is a cruel torment.