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When I started in the theater, I'd do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women's roles.
Annette Bening -
There are so many different kinds of relationships, so it's sort of difficult to define what is considered normal.
Annette Bening
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I think what's interesting about the whole paparazzi thing is that unless you're Brad Pitt or Madonna, you can pretty much avoid it. You know when you're going to an opening that you will be photographed, so that's fine. And you know the restaurants that have paparazzi, so you don't go to them.
Annette Bening -
It's kind of a mystery to me, as far as my own life experiences and what I've witnessed - why some people can just move on through traumatic experiences, in childhood particularly, and why other people are just paralyzed by it. I just don't know how and why that is.
Annette Bening -
Oh, honey, I'm from Oklahoma! This is who I am - middle-class all the way!
Annette Bening -
Our children see us a certain way, and we want to be seen by them in a certain way. I certainly want to be a strong, stable, loving, consistent presence in my children's lives. But we are human beings, too.
Annette Bening -
I saw a Shakespeare play when I was - I guess I was in junior high. And I just fell in love with the theater because, for me, it was a combination of big ideas and feeling.
Annette Bening -
I love the luxury of the camera. The camera does so much for you. I like the secrets a camera can tell.
Annette Bening
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My sister and I fought a lot when we were kids. I was the little bratty sister, and she would kind of walk away, not wanting to be associated with me.
Annette Bening -
And if there's anything movies can do in a way that I just love, and I love as an audience is, 'Show me something I don't know about. Show me something I haven't seen.'
Annette Bening -
My dad was in the life insurance business, so I learned about selling when I was about 14 because I started working as a secretary.
Annette Bening -
Getting all dressed up and putting on fancy clothes - all of that's a great thing, but oddly, it doesn't really have a lot to do with acting most of the time.
Annette Bening -
I always wonder about people's history and their lives, especially people that are a little bit more distant, who obviously have had some kind of a thing, and you know there's some reason why they're not able to connect. It's not because they don't want to. They don't have the ability.
Annette Bening -
I read 'Game Change.' If you want to relive the campaign, that book is unbelievable. It's great. It's the book of that campaign. It brought all the memories back of everything with Clinton and Obama, and Sarah Palin and McCain, and choosing her, and John Edwards. It was an interesting book.
Annette Bening
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I still remember the five points of salesmanship: attention, interest, conviction, desire and close.
Annette Bening -
I am really looking forward as I get older and older, to being less and less nice.
Annette Bening -
With movies, so much of it is, 'Who is the human being that is going to be directing it?' Because it is their medium. In a way, you are serving the director, and when it is someone that you feel you can have a lot of confidence in, it can make a big difference.
Annette Bening -
I just want to be educated.
Annette Bening -
If anything, I want to please people too much.
Annette Bening -
It used to be the one or the other, right? You were the 'bad girl' or the 'good girl' or the 'bad mother' or 'the good mother,' 'the horrible businesswoman who eschewed her children' or 'the earth mother who was happy to be at home baking pies,' all of that stuff that we sort of knew was a lie.
Annette Bening
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A lot of directors in my experience are very receptive. They see what you do first, and then they want to find a place to put the camera, and they tweak you here and there.
Annette Bening -
I've made some movies that I really loved that nobody saw.
Annette Bening -
By the time I was in high school, Roe v. Wade had passed, so that was also happening; girls were getting pregnant and getting abortions - and that happened in my school too.
Annette Bening -
I act, but I am a mother first and wife second.
Annette Bening