Almost exactly one month before she passed away, the quotable and lovable Carrie Fisher appeared on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” where she dispensed pearls of wisdom — as well as incisive barbs — with host Terry Gross.
Here are a few of her best lines:
“I don’t think it’s that revealing, or it’s certainly not offensive. It’s not unkind about him. It’s flattering. I mean, the way people are reacting to it is funny to me, too. I’d do him at 73.” — Fisher talking about her affair with “Star Wars” co-star Harrison Ford in her autobiography “The Princess Diarist”
“I don’t know, maybe eight years ago some guy said to me, I thought about you every day from when I was 12 to when I was 22. And I said every day? And he said, well, four times a day.” — on realizing she was the object of many young men’s fantasies
“I actually don’t think there is that much of a downside. The downside is the hair. The downside is the hair and some of the outfits. But I like Princess Leia. I like how she handles things. I like how she treats people. I — she tells the truth. She, you know, gets what she wants done. I don’t have a real problem with Princess Leia. I’ve sort of melded with her over time.” — on playing Princess Leia
“A giant, fat face like a sanddab with features.” — on her self-image when she played Princess Leia
“No, I didn’t. I wanted a relationship with him, and that was the one that was available so I took it.” — on not resenting becoming a caretaker to her father, who left the family when she was 2 to be with Elizabeth Taylor
“It was the dialogue: ‘I thought I recognized your foul stench when I arrived on board.’ Say that like I just said it. It sounds weird. So it was very arch dialogue, so that’s my excuse. And I’m living with it right now.” — on why her “Star Wars” accent sounded vaguely British
“There are very few women from her generation who worked like that, who just kept a career going all her life and raised children and had horrible relationships and lost all her money and got it back again. I mean, she’s had an amazing life, and she’s someone to admire.” — on her mother, Debbie Reynolds
“Oh, I think I do overshare, and I sometime marvel that I do it. But it’s sort of — in a way, it’s my way of trying to understand myself. I don’t know. I get it out of my head. It creates community when you talk about private things and you can find other people that have the same things. Otherwise, I don’t know – I felt very lonely with some of the issues that I had or history that I had. And when I shared about it, I found that others had it, too.” — on oversharing
“I’ve never seen my mother with bad manners until I saw her with the nurses. But they were telling her what to do, and no one tells my mother what to do. And so I had – I had to say at one point to my mother, when she was yelling at her nurse, Mom, not cool.” — on her mother’s relationship with her nurses