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.
ALAN ARKINI 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.
More Alan Arkin Quotes
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I don’t believe there’s anything in life you can’t go back and fix.
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You can begin to see an amalgamation of cultures, the real beginning of one world.
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And then that’s what you have to be. But what I’m looking for is the opportunity to explore what I can do, probing the limits, learning.
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We might just as well let the rest of it go, join the party, and dance our hearts out.
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It’s murder to doubt yourself in life. It took until I was 45 to get to that point.
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Hollywood is a strange place. The class structure here is more rigid than almost anyplace I’ve ever experienced. It’s made more difficult by the fact that it’s constantly changing.
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For many years my acting came from a place of surmounting some enormous obstacle.
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Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a Cockney singing group with a Southern Negro style and Indian and electronic music.
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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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There’s a familiarity that sometimes shocks and annoys the hell out of me.
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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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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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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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I gotta keep busy. I’m not happy unless I’m working on two, three things.
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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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Things are never going to turn out how you think they will.
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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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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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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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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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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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A product is most easily sold when it has an identity. So they wrap you all up and put a label on you.
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It doesn’t mean we don’t take it seriously, but no one is under the delusion (that we’re) bringing world peace.
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You never know what class you belong to unless you’re one of the two or three people that have been in the same echelon for a long, long time.
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Either you’re growing or you’re decaying; there’s no middle ground. If you’re standing still, you’re decaying.
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All I can say is if the part doesn’t delight me in some way, or I can’t feel any compassion for it, I just can’t do it.
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