Tyne Daly Quotes

Before 'Cagney and Lacey,' we didn't follow officers home to find out what they did when they took their badges off and emptied their guns. So the idea that these women also had lives outside of work was really interesting to play.

I went into the family business. To me, it was the norm and not the exception.

I'm sorry I didn't wear paint this morning. I tend not to wear it unless I'm getting highly paid.

I'm interested in playing old ladies because I am becoming one. And I want to become a very good one!

I am a greedy actor in the sense that I like the big bites. Put a big fat steak in front of me, and I will eat it.

In sixth and seventh grade, my two best friends and I pretended to be horses. Every day after school, we would gallop around, whinnying and stamping our hooves and tossing our manes - for hours.

When I got married, my marriage was illegal in 17 states because my husband had a different skin color than I did. And we saw those laws go down one at a time.

I am pretty sure that all young human beings have, at one time or another in their growing-up, been actors. They have used their imaginations to carry them away from painful or confusing situations ... have imagined themselves to be more powerful or beautiful or brave or loving than they are.

I don't have a waist: I'm a breadbox on top of legs.

The art of acting is to pitch good. You do the pitching and hope that the other person catches the ball and does some good pitching back to you.

Everyone's life is a train wreck. Your life happens to be a high-class train wreck.

A critic never fights the battle; they just go around shooting the wounded.

Love is as strict as acting. If you want to love somebody, stand there and do it. If you don't, don't. There are no other choices.

I think mothers get a raw deal in American culture, so I've been defending them. I have three daughters, and I know that as they become mothers, they got a lot more gentle towards me!

I was raised to be in service to something larger than myself. A lot of actors concentrate on what they will get out of the profession, rather than what they can offer it. The way I see it, if you come with something to offer, you can offer it forever.

I never played the 'decoration,' I always played the one who suffered. And then I got very lucky in my middle career, when I started playing the hero, which at that point was quite rare for women.

My time on television began, and I started playing victims. I did about 10 or 12 years of them, which gets boring, right?

I'm not glamorous, I don't have a look, I don't know anything about opera, I have no Italian, and I'm too old.

I don't want people instructing me what to do with my body; I don't want the government to tell me what I can do in my bedroom, with my body, or with whoever I choose to love.

There was this wonderful trick of going to the theater with my parents and sitting in the audience under the watchful eye of an usher, and then these other people would come on the stage: They spoke differently and had different clothes and hair. Afterward, they would come back, and they were my parents again. It was magic.

Sweat makes good friendship cement.

What I like is the acting itself. But I'm a lousy celebrity. I'm not interested in selling my private life. I take my private feelings to the work, but I want there to be a difference between me and whoever it is I'm playing.

You know, my hair is very upsetting to people, but it's upsetting on purpose. It is important to look old so that the young will not be afraid of dying. People don't like old women. We don't honor age in our society, and we certainly don't honor it in Hollywood.

Many more people saw me on TV than will ever get to see me on stage, but I do love being in the same room as the people I'm telling the story to.

The first time I was nominated for an award for professional acting, I was in my mid-twenties. I was married and the mother of my first two daughters. I had been working for near to 15 years.

I believe imagination to be a uniquely human gift. The reason I like my job, and have liked it for more than half a century, is that I get to use my imagination.