Sally Field would like to clarify a thing or two about her famous Oscar speech.

In 1985, Field won Best Actress at the Academy Awards for her performance as widowed Edna Spalding in Places in the Heart, five years after first winning the prize for Norma Rae. When she took the stage to accept her second Oscar, Field gave a memorable speech that would later become infamously misquoted.

“The first time I won for Norma, it was so unexpected. I had come out of nowhere,” the Remarkably Bright Creatures star, 79, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “So I was so numb when I won. I don’t remember walking up on the stage. I didn’t feel any of it.”

So when she was honored at the 1985 ceremony, Field wanted to take it all in.

“I had to have a moment of allowing myself to feel that I had done something, that I had conquered something that was so hard for me to do,” Field says. “It doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t continue to need to be conquered on a daily basis for the work to keep on getting better, to keep understanding it on a different level.”

Standing on stage and holding her Oscar, Field began: “This means so much more to me this time. I don’t know why. I think the first time I hardly felt it because it was all so new.”

After expressing her gratitude to the film’s cast and her family, she went on to deliver one of the most famous lines in Oscar history.

“But I want to say thank you to you,” Field said while clutching her Oscar. “I haven’t had an orthodox career, and I’ve wanted more than anything to have your respect. The first time I didn’t feel it, but this time I feel it. And I can’t deny the fact that you like me! Right now, you like me!”

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Says Field now, “I wanted to take this moment and see it and own it for myself, that for this one minute in time —maybe never again— you like me, you really like me. And that’s what I said.”

The star, who had not planned her speech because she felt it was “bad luck,” acknowledges her words are “completely always misquoted.”

She adds, “It became this whole [thing], but the reality is that I was talking to myself.”

The two-time Oscar winner now stars in Netflix’s Remarkably Bright Creatures as Tova, a widow who forms an unlikely bond with an octopus named Marcellus while working at a local aquarium as she takes a rootless young man (Lewis Pullman) under her wing. The film, which begins streaming on Netflix May 8, is based on the bestselling novel by Shelby Van Pelt.

“It’s a lovely, lovely little book about healing, about family, and an homage to sea creatures,” Field says of the novel. “I read about three chapters and said yes.”

For more stories behind the scenes of Field’s Oscar-winning career, pick up a copy of PEOPLE, on newsstands now.