I had a hard time treating my field as if it’s horse racing, putting actors in competition against each other.
ALAN ARKINThat’s what we’re all doing, all the time, whether we know it or not. Whether we like it or not. Creating something on the spur of the moment with the materials at hand.
More Alan Arkin Quotes
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I don’t live in L.A. on purpose because I don’t wanna be immersed in that. I have to have a real life, with real people.
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Confronting some stern and faceless judge who would condemn me to a pit of hell if I didn’t achieve the “zone,” if even for a moment. Not a particularly happy place to work from.
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There’s a familiarity that sometimes shocks and annoys the hell out of me.
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I played guitar. I’ve always considered myself an actor, but I wasn’t making a living as an actor. So I was in a couple of folk groups that managed to keep me in underwear and burritos.
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That’s what we’re all doing, all the time, whether we know it or not. Whether we like it or not. Creating something on the spur of the moment with the materials at hand.
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Two-thirds of American movies are extensions of commercials — they tell you how to feel and they tell you how to think — rather than letting you figure it out on your own.
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Improvisation sometimes seemed more like jazz than acting, like verbal jazz, with the actors playing a theme back and forth, and then introducing another themeM
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Marriage requires searing honesty at all costs. I learned that from my third wife.
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Truth is always unfolding. It’s not an absolute.
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It keeps it more of a surprise. I don’t feel like it has to be a mystery.
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” Education does not mean jamming information into somebody’s head. Rather, it’s that ancient idea that all knowledge is within us; to teach is to help somebody pull it out of themselves.
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What I’ve learned about teaching is to refer back to the root of that word, which is educo, which means “to pull from.
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I had a bunch of lean years where I had to do things, a lot of which I wasn’t wildly enthusiastic about.
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Creativity means learning where the rules exist, and then breaking them! Saying, “It’s better this way.” But you have to know the rules in order to break them with any grace.
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IN order to inform what I’m doing; otherwise, it just becomes the snake eating its own tail. Vampirism.
ALAN ARKIN






