Most people call me Mercy. I like it

I loved playing the part of the feisty Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker

Alcohol is a very patient drug. It will wait for the alcoholic to pick it up one more time.

At awards time, The Exorcist was nominated in 11 categories, everybody but the janitor was up for an Oscar. There was no category for what I did.

My only true harmony lies deep within my soul, wherever that is. I know that somehow I am in tune with the universe.

I believe in joy, but I believe in the flip-side, agony.

I can choose to accelerate my disease to an alcoholic death or incurable insanity, or I can choose to live within my thoroughly human condition.

One of the cruelest judgments sustained against me is that I have spoken out as a recovered alcoholic to stimulate my acting career.

Aside from my son, no person has ever shown for me the gentle concern I knew from Governor Adlai Stevenson.

I have reached a state in life where I can buy a whole house full of chairs and can bump into them until they are black and blue

I'd never been in play long enough for the flowers to die in the dressing room

If freedom, democracy, and the rights of man are to be preserved through the ages, free men and women must accept the responsibilities that go with their freedoms.

We preach revolution but whine about the oppression in the name of change

All empty souls tend to extreme opinion.

If I don't do laundry today, I'm gonna have to buy new clothes tomorrow.

When I tried to hit puberty I swung and I missed.

A writer's business is minding other people's business ... all the vices of the village gossip are the virtues of the writer.

The way animals were and are abused appalls me to this very day.

I'm not interested to change about the government. I'm interested to change the conditions for the people. So, yes, I talk a lot. But I think this is the only way for Italy in this moment.

Obstacles are an opportunity to create something new

The interviewer always learns something new from the interviewee. It opens up your mind to new ideas and the vast multiplicity of human experience.