I don’t love the business. I never wanted to be a part of it. I don’t think any actor does.
ALAN ARKINImprovisation sometimes seemed more like jazz than acting, like verbal jazz, with the actors playing a theme back and forth, and then introducing another themeM
More Alan Arkin Quotes
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I know that if I can’t move people, then I have no business being an actor.
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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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I’ve always considered myself an actor, but I wasn’t making a living as an actor.
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I used to watch the world as if it was a performance and I would realize that certain things that people did moved me, and certain things didn’t move me, and I tried to analyze.
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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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Is it possible to have an endless series of successes without falling on our faces?
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For many years my acting came from a place of surmounting some enormous obstacle.
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I’m an actor. My life as an actor depends on who sends me what. I’m just taking the best stuff that I can find that’s sent my way, regardless of how big or little the paycheck is.
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[The business is] more corporate and more formulaic and less experiential.
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Every physicist knows that things connect with each other. To isolate things is not the way the universe works – winning best actor is arbitrary.
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There’s a familiarity that sometimes shocks and annoys the hell out of me.
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If you want to be an actor and you love acting, you can do it whether you’re doing something else or not.
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No matter what you do or where you are, you’re going to be missing out on something.
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I gotta keep busy. I’m not happy unless I’m working on two, three things.
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Incorporating it, somehow trying to work their way all together to a meaning of some kind, or at least a conclusion.
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I suppose it is, but I think it would entail doing the same things over and over again without taking chances, without taking risks or exploring our limits, without finding out what we can and can’t do.
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Even at that age, six and seven and eight, why I was moved by certain things they did
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If I’m doing a fake movie, it’s gonna be a fake hit.
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The ancient Vedas – the oldest Hindu philosophy – and modern science agree that time is an illusion. If that’s true, there’s no such thing as a past or a future – it’s all one huge now. So what you fix now affects the past and the future.
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No matter how much time you spend reading books or following your intuition, you’re gonna screw it up. Fifty times. You can’t do parenting right.
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You can begin to see an amalgamation of cultures, the real beginning of one world.
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I don’t believe there’s anything in life you can’t go back and fix.
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But one of the things I learned from improvising is that all of life is an improvisation, whether you like it or not.
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You can be connected with community theater or make your own little movies. But, if you want to be a movie star, you’ve got a tough road ahead of you.
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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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TV has taken reflection out of the human condition. People didn’t use to have a ready answer for everything, whether they knew something about it or not.
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