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.
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.
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.
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.
I read somewhere that some people believe that the entire universe is a matrix of living thought. And I said, “Man, if that’s not a definition of God, I don’t know what is.
” 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.
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
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.
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.
![Alan Arkin Quote - [The business is] more corporate and more formulaic and less experiential.](https://minimalistquotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/the-business-is-more-corporate-and-more-formulaic--683x1024.jpg)
