Sarah Wayne Callies

I'm growing as an artist and expanding my range, and not pigeonholing myself by doing the same thing, over and over.

I'm learning to hunt with rifles, because if you think about it, hunting gets you the healthiest meat - organic, free-range food. It's a totally yuppie spin on what I thought was kind of a redneck occupation.

The rite of passage of learning to build a fire that will burn all night with one match is not an insignificant one in my husband's family, and I grew up camping and backpacking. I love to camp.

Learning to shoot firearms to me is a little like driving stick - it seems like a decent skill to have.

You don't take a job in acting at all expecting 25 years in and a pension.

Hospitals are great places, and you can learn from them, but you don't necessarily need to go in anytime you get the sniffles. And maybe you shouldn't treat pregnancy as a disease.

An actor without an audience is rehearsing.

Well, I do lie for a living. I'm an actor.

I love doing action scenes, there's that great thing when you sort of stop acting because if you're running, you're not acting like you're running, you are just actually running.

I watched Ricki Lake's documentary, 'The Business of Being Born,' and that led me to call a midwife, and not an ob-gyn, when I found out I had conceived. My delivery was not easy - they call it 'labor,' not 'a vacation!' - but I was incredibly grateful that I did it that way.

My husband's family is military. Preparation is just, from that family perspective, it's just a part of what makes sense to do. You buy insurance for your house; you have a go bag.

Your work isn't just to learn and say the lines. Your work is to figure out what the chatter in your brain is, that's going on under the lines. It doesn't matter whether you're speaking or not speaking because your mind is working the way your character's mind would work.