Natasha Lyonne Quotes

1. I would have done well as a gypsy child, I think. A circus baby. I could have played a great street urchin or ragamuffin. Or just been one. I certainly liked entertaining people and making jokes, but I don't know necessarily if that's what your child is prone to that you should necessarily put them in a real working industry at six years old.


2. (on New York) I have a real love affair with the city. I just feel like when you're up or when you're down, the city really cushions you. I feel like I just have such the blood and bones of a New Yorker that I can almost imagine better, like, giving up the fight and not being able to afford the city and going out West, keeping a small place here, and then when I'm like 80, coming back here, living on the park and going to the theater. For the matinee.

3. It's such a weird thing: to sit and look at yourself is so distracting to the psyche. It would be like me standing in front of a mirror and looking at myself all day, trying to find a flaw.

4. Rather than spend so much time wondering if I'm going to get hired, or is it a problem that I've got this black-tar history, I've just got to keep doing what I'm doing and try to be decent.










5. There are beauty icons that I can never be like, sorta like a Gena Rowlands - I'll never have that look. I love Giulietta Masina, the great Fellini actress. But I'm probably more Seymour Cassel. Or somewhere between Lou Reed and Nora Ephron?

6. Abnormal day looks like, you know, shower, put on the same jeans, the same tattered Gucci loafers I got at the thrift store, white socks, and my t-shirt and my very beat-up Helmut Lang blazer. I'm in the exact same outfit every day.











7. The thing about curly hair is that it's a toss-up. Some days you can let it air dry and it's better than a hair-do, but some days you just look like a sloppy person. I'm really resistant to a trim. I only do it when it gets hard to brush out in the shower, then I'll submit, begrudgingly.

8. My family moved to Israel when I was eight until I was 10, and then we came back, and my parents split up. I was suddenly in a single-parent home and on scholarship. Fifth grade was such a hard year for me.










9. If I was a bajillionaire, I would spend a lot of time at Barneys just buying all kinds of great things all the time. I would have so many black cashmeres it would be out of control. I like the way nice things feel very much.

10. I guess that is my biggest fear, sort of worrying about the fact that I keep getting more insecure as time goes on rather than feeling more grand with each turn. I feel more and more afraid. When I get my picture taken, I'm convinced it's because I must look terrible and they're going to put it in US Weekly as a joke.

11. I'm not to be confused with Natasha Henstridge in "Species," where I just emerge out of the weird alien womb looking amazing. I really rely heavily on my black outfits and my gold chains to give me sort of a thing.




12. As a woman, I've learned that having a uniform of your staples or setting your look and saying what distinguishes you - like red lips or hair or whatever - leaves so much time for the rest of the day.

13. You've got to do something with all the books you've read, so you might as well imagine you've optioned them.

14. As a New Yorker, or wherever I am, I just want to know I can get our of the house in five minutes if I have to and not have to spend a bunch of time obsessing in the mirror, trying on a million different options. Now, I just know what works.

15. I have a deep compassion for the idea that it's okay to be myself. The idea that anything "other" is bad and wrong and broken is so wildly off base.







16. When I was a young person working, everybody was older than me, so I had to kind of keep up. I'd see every movie and listen to everything played, and read all the relevant books. Being an actor, it's kind of your job to know what came before you and how big your feelings are allowed to be.

17. I adore Eddie Kaye Thomas and Jason Biggs. Eddie was the only one who called me when they were doing "American Reunion" and told me: "You need to do this."

18. You compare yourself to somebody who you think is a peer, and you can totally lose the plot, and not understand that you are nothing like them in the first place, and it was never you versus anybody.

19. I mean, I didn't have a 28-day drug problem. I had a take-five-years-off drug problem. (Because of) my well-publicized drug problem, there was many years I couldn't get work...I mean, life is very short but life is also very long. I don't know that there's such a rush. I think I also needed a break just in terms of the child actor in me was tired. I mean, I'd been working from, like, 6 to 24, pretty much nonstop.




20. My life is very much in the present today. And that's what theater is all about.

21. (on performing her role as a cat-loving school teacher in "G.B.F") If you're at all a reasonable human being when you're 34 years old, you don't read scripts looking at the children's parts. I don't really feel like I need to be a teenager ever again. It's really a miracle that I made it out alive. I'm doing all right being in my 30s - I think I'm hitting my sweet spot. I'm glad to have already come of age.

22. I'm somebody who believes in funny things, and laughing, but I do like for them to come from a place that addresses the human condition.

23. I have a lot of friends who are trying to clean up their act, or that are still making trouble for themselves, so I'm definitely well-versed on what goes on in the mind and the heart of a person who self-destructs as their coping mechanism, and also what they're like when you take their preferred substance away.

24. My hair is such a statement that it's like a neon sign asking for trouble.

25. I have to say, I'm still surprised anyone's nice to me, that anyone talks to me. But I think people understand that other people go through things. We're all a bit gonzo, and you're allowed to take a little time to get your head on straight.

26. Listen, I'm not for everyone. Maybe those officers didn't understand that I was kidding…Maybe a lot of those people who wrote up those police reports thought I was being serious. They probably don't have my same sense of humor. It's not like they have a Petri dish of highbrow comedy over at the precinct.




27. I often think my boyfriend is going to leave me just from seeing how I talk to the dog. But you know, when you are talking to your dog, you are accessing this softer side of you. Everything else melts away.

28. I was this kid who had been raised in New York, and now all of a sudden, my mother decided that she was a Jewish divorcee and therefore she should be living in Miami Beach.












29. I feel like I just have such the blood and bones of a New Yorker that I can almost imagine better, like, giving up the fight and not being able to afford the city and going out West, keeping a small place here, and then when I'm like 80, coming back here, living on the park and going to the theater.

30. I will take the subway and look at certain women and think "God, that woman's story will never be told. How come that lady doesn't get a movie about her?"






31. There's something great about all your worst fears coming true and being said about you. There's a tremendous liberation on some level.

32. I started wearing all black around the time I got into Nirvana. I first heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" when I was about 12, and I remember jumping on my bed, so excited about it.




33. There are epic downsides to living a somewhat public life. The upshot of that is there's nothing to hide. It's a relief in a way. There's nothing about me that can't be said.

34. The audience is equally responsible for making "Scary Movie 3" as the studio system is because as long as they continue to go see "Fast and Furious 4", they're going to make it. You have to remember that studio heads went to NYU and stuff and film school and they wanted to make great films and were seduced by "The Godfather" and instead, this is the world that were in.

35. I'm not someone who went to acting school - I was just out of the gate, doing it.


36. I always see the absurdity in most situations. It's my experience of how life works.

37. Sometimes the things that come out of my mouth are mortifying.

38. From the first instant I met her, I wanted to be Nora Ephron. I just really wanted to please her.

39. I learned that if you're going to be a troublemaker, you don't want a ton of witnesses, because there's inevitable fallout from living like you're in "Lord of the Flies."







40. I don't really feel like I need to be a teenager ever again.

41. My fault has been honesty and I've been sentenced to a lifetime of independent movies, and that's it. That's how it feels right now.







42. I do have an outsider's complex of getting made fun of. I was made fun of as a kid, and I don't have the stomach for it.

43. That's usually how I get to know strangers - get inappropriately touchy. Once they've experienced the awkwardness of you being way too close for comfort, after that, it all gets easy.






44. I have a pretty fancy facialist, this woman Dale Breault. Getting older, it's a good thing to have a serious facialist.

45. As a rule people don't think other people on drugs are funny. They think they are tragic. They have a point, but I still had the funny.

46. I would love to option "Crying of Lot 49" and turn it into a movie.

47. The aging process is totally minimizing. Life in general is pretty minimizing because you have a lot of big ideas, and you have to battle the mistaken delusions and instability that come with youth.





48. Honestly, I'm as rebellious as I used to be and my definition of shaking things up isn't what it used to be. 

49. As wild as I was, when the cops show up, and suddenly you're being handcuffed, it's so deeply shocking and terrifying, the loss of freedom.

50. I'm a movie star. Can I talk to my entertainment lawyer?

51. I grew up in Manhattan, and I've always had all kinds of people around me. I've always had a very "live and let live" point of view.

52. Beauty was never really my trip. Maybe those roles are attracted to me?

53. Let's face it. I'm an open book.

54. I'm not a movie star. I'm an actor, clearly, but at the same time, I don't have anything else going on. My hobbies are movies and going to the Film Forum and sitting there during the day for the double feature. That's my life. My life is music, books and movies, that's all I know. That's all I care about and I mean, as a fourteen year old kid, I was reading Entertainment Weekly and was curious about what was going on and I still read US Weekly. I don't give a shit. The point is that I wish that I had life outside of this, and I think that if this is what I'm doing then at least I want it to be a little bit more interesting or important.

55. It's not easy trying to navigate your internal world in the public eye.



56. I have a theory that self-made, first-generation actresses don't feel entitled to success.


57. In my experience of living, for a time, in the underbelly of society, I spent a lot of time in various holding cells.

58. Look, I'm not thrilled that perfect strangers get to have an opinion about me or feel like they know me, but I have enough perspective to know they don't know me, and I do have a life and I don't live it for other people…My reality is very different from what everyone read. The problem is because I did get myself in a lot of trouble, I didn't get to do the kind of work that maybe I should have been doing, so it became confusing who I really am and what I am really about…It's totally f…king strange to me that people took a lot of that fucking stuff seriously…It's not their fault that they don't know me personally. Who's got the time?

59. Life is a wildly transient thing with people coming into your life and dropping away. It definitely takes work to maintain relationships.






60. It's a wild thing, that people have the ability to help each other by just relating to one another.

61. The world at large doesn't always make sense to me, and there are safe havens. Linda Manz in "Out of the Blue" is one of them.




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