Top 66 Mariette Hartley Quotes

Dad was a hunter and had guns in the house all the time.

I didn’t know anything about ‘Star Trek.’ I was doing theater a lot in those days, getting my life together. I didn’t watch television. So, to come in on it was a really amazing experience.

My karma doesn’t seem to be a big screen karma: it’s definitely a little-screen karma.

I enjoy live television a lot, but I’m not crazy about the hours.

Mariette is a nickname. My real name is Mary Loretta.

I don’t think anyone thought showbiz people know anything. I would suggest interview subjects, were told they weren’t such great ideas, and then they would be assigned to somebody else. I wasn’t given anything to do. I felt like the highest-paid dress extra in the world.

I feel my free-est when I don’t know where I’m going, when I’m not scripted, and doing crazy things.

I really don’t know how women in television news do the job. It’s a very male-oriented business.

I don’t know how much longer I can go on without my becoming known as ‘the camera woman.’

I started acting when I was 10.

It hasn’t been easy for me to get roles in movies after so much exposure on television. There’s an anathema about TV, and breaking away from it is difficult for almost everybody.

I’m awfully tired of playing grieving people, which seems to have been my bent in the last five years. But it’s an important part of my life and if I can express it in any way, I will – including doing seminars.

I think I’ve proven that I’m issue-oriented and I’m not apolitical. But I’m not a journalist and I don’t want to be one with that veneer exterior.

My greatest strength as a person? I guess I get caught in it a lot, but I think it’s my ability to put myself in someone else’s shoes.

When you sing, you’re releasing so much more than you are when you’re speaking. You risk more as a singer.

One of the wonderful things about Shakespeare is that he trusted an audience to move quickly with him. One moment tragedy, the next comedy.

Humility is a very tough thing to have, especially when you’re a tough guy.

Before the Polaroid commercials, my image was that of a solid actress, a theater actress who could do anything. But the Polaroid commercials were high comedy… Through them I was finally noticed as a comedian.

It’s an extraordinary experience to encounter the two kinds of deaths of my parents, one violent and jagged, it hits you like a tornado, the other, gentle with grace and dignity.

I always tell kids, in high school or acting students, to do something else around acting, or not around it, just in your life that is of service.

Once we make the commitment to help ourselves, we are able to help others – and the universe supports our commitments.

My training was in theater, and I was asked to be a journalist.

It’s much easier to do a TV series because an actress can stay put.

The problem with ‘Today’ was whether it was an entertainment show. Tom Brokaw and I had that battle for three weeks. He’s a purist, and I was brought in for entertainment.

Our deepest wounds when integrated become our greatest power.

I’m not a compulsive worker, and I’ve never been a workaholic, so if I have a three-week vacation, I don’t want to do a movie-of-the-week.

But I will say that TV was a great education for me. It allowed me to develop techniques for getting the job done. It’s the best training ground since B movies.

What took some time for me to figure out was how to have a life outside my career, to find a way to be inclusive rather than exclusive. It came only after years of psychotherapy and deep soul-searching.

My household, as I was growing up, was a house of hidden shame.

I don’t even consider it therapy anymore. I consider it availing myself of a guide.

I’d make a terrible therapist.

I’ve never done a musical before. I’ve sung, off and on, all of my life. But I have never, ever done a musical.

For me, that is what my mission seems to be in my life on earth – to be awake, to stay awake, and to bring a certain kind of consciousness to the world, and to myself.

I love those kinds of parts that don’t seem to be huge but they really strike a chord with the audience.

I’m a firm believer in therapy.

I’ve been keeping journals since I was a kid.

I think my strength as a performer is my ability to straddle the fence between comedy and tragedy.

After I played the frigid doctor on the ‘Peyton Place’ series, all I got for a long while was offers for more frigid doctor parts.

My father was a farm boy who never learned to be holding and supportive.

I give as much detail as I do about the bad times because people out there don’t know that others have been through hell but then through the process of amazing grace. You hope that someone out there will hear what you have to say, and that it may matter.

I think I know what middle America enjoys seeing.

It was a stumbling career at best before the Polaroid commercials. I think they definitely, if there’s a word to use, focused – pardon the pun, ’cause I don’t mean it that way – my career.

I’m impulsive, spontaneous; I have a joy in my life today that doesn’t quit.

It was a joy to do something sensual and sexy. It was exciting. I don’t get many of those types of roles.

Theater has always been my less-fickle friend.

I have tried very hard to sing. I’ve taken a lot of lessons. I’ve always wanted to. It’s always been my dream.

My mother‘s father was the behavioral psychologist, John B. Watson.

Well, thank God I have this face, and it’s a believable face, and that also seems to be my acting style.

My family is really a classy ‘Simpsons.’

I’ve never had a homosexual or bisexual experience, but it doesn’t make me uncomfortable to dip into those feelings. I think a lot of women have those feelings without acting on them.

I’ve always done challenging pieces.

If you are on the right medication… stay on it and don’t change. But if it doesn’t seem to be working, then go to a doctor and find the right one for you.

My happiest moments are when I’m on my high wire with the Johnny Carsons of the world. I don’t have that opportunity if I’m doing other people’s scripts.

It’s nice to be thought of as soft and sensual.

I’ve been able to survive a lot of things, and I am especially interested in survivor stories.

I consider myself an articulate actor, and I don’t consider myself a second-tier actor.

I was very much a character actress. But I’ve never stopped doing theater.

It seems to have taken me a long time to find my identity.

If I could change two things, it would be my chest.

My father was a very strong male figure to me as a child. He was very dashing, had a wonderful sense of humor and was romantically handsome in the Scott Fitzgerald genre.

I’m always in Jamaica in my fantasies. We have a home there, and it’s my special spiritual place where I get re-nourished.

I would be nowhere without my mistakes. I rely on them.

Nobody knew I could do comedy until I started Polaroid.

Tom Brokaw has friends who are actors, and yet he feels that, as bright as they are, they are not articulate. So he said how astonished he was that Sidney Poitier, with whom he’d just taped an interview, had been so articulate.

During the years I was growing up, I was trying very hard to be a regular person.

My career was one mistake after another. I was working a lot, but nothing was building, it wan’t going toward anything.