Alan Arkin Quotes

#1. Filmmakers, they tell me they want to make movies. I say, 'Good, go out, buy a $500 camera, get some friends and make a movie. Don't go to Hollywood. Stay wherever you are.'

Alan Arkin

#2. I don't care about names attached to the script. That doesn't matter to me. All things being equal, I would like to work with a good script with a good director, and the part I play is of less important than those two factors.

Alan Arkin

#3. 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, in order to inform what I'm doing; otherwise, it just becomes the snake eating its own tail. Vampirism.

Alan Arkin

#4. I gotta make a living. I make no bones about that. Most actors do. But within that context, I've never not tried to make something as fresh and alive as I possibly could make it.

Alan Arkin

#5. No matter what you do or where you are, you're going to be missing out on something.

Alan Arkin

#6. I'm as old as I am, and I don't try to hide it. It's not a big deal.

Alan Arkin

#7. My father was a painter. There was a lot of singing. We hung around with a lot of folk musicians. My family knew a lot of great folk musicians of the time, like Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Leadbelly. They were all people we knew.

Alan Arkin

#8. 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.

Alan Arkin

#9. I don't mind watching plays once in a while, but as long as I don't have to be in them.

Alan Arkin

#10. You hit a certain age, and you haven't died yet, and you become an elder statesman. I think I get a lot of applause because I'm not keeling over.

Alan Arkin

#11. 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.

Alan Arkin

#12. It's not that there is a terrible morality in Hollywood. I think there isn't any. There isn't any, by and large.

Alan Arkin

#13. 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.

Alan Arkin

#14. Everybody's career has ups and downs. I like to take chances; I don't like to stand still. And I don't give a damn what the market is interested in; I want to try things.

Alan Arkin

#15. That's the privilege of old age: You don't have to remember.

Alan Arkin

#16. I'm not sure if I've learned anything from show business. Life in general has taught me if you're kind to people, everything gets easier. Being a decent person really smoothes the way for you and everyone else.

Alan Arkin

#17. I don't think it does the audience any good to know what I do to prepare. It keeps it more of a surprise. I don't feel like it has to be a mystery.

Alan Arkin

#18. If you want to be an actor and you love acting, you can do it whether you're doing something else or not. 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.

Alan Arkin

#19. I would like to have a movie under my own control sometime, and see what could be done with it. Who knows? Maybe Hollywood will make an improvisational movie someday.

Alan Arkin

#20. I know that if I can't move people, then I have no business being an actor.

Alan Arkin

#21. 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, even at that age, six and seven and eight, why I was moved by certain things they did.

Alan Arkin

#22. If I'm going to make a fake movie, it's going to be a fake hit.

Alan Arkin

#23. I don't like improvising on camera, particularly, but very often, a scene will not be working, and you rehearse it once or twice, and you realize something's missing. So I'll play with it until it makes sense.

Alan Arkin

#24. For everybody, the tide comes in, the tide goes out - if you're an actor, particularly.

Alan Arkin

#25. For many years my acting came from a place of surmounting some enormous obstacle, 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.

Alan Arkin

#26. I used to have a lot of philosophies of acting; they all fell apart over the years.

Alan Arkin

#27. Every physicist knows that things connect with each other. To isolate things is not the way the universe works - winning best actor is arbitrary.

Alan Arkin

#28. I love doing kids' shows, and I love working with kids. I've done a lot of it. A lot of people don't like working with children, but I love it.

Alan Arkin

#29. I get a little upset, yeah, if a year goes by and I don't get a script. Thank God I have other interests that keep me from becoming a nervous wreck.

Alan Arkin

#30. I can't even pretend to play golf.

Alan Arkin

#31. I don't sense that I am someone's hero, though I'm happy when people like my work. I've learned how to be gracious about it, but I try to let it go by. I've seen how, if people start taking on those accolades, it can ruin them completely.

Alan Arkin

#32. There's a familiarity that sometimes shocks and annoys the hell out of me. People want a relationship with you that they haven't earned.

Alan Arkin

#33. Either you're growing or you're decaying; there's no middle ground. If you're standing still, you're decaying.

Alan Arkin

#34. I gotta keep busy. I'm not happy unless I'm working on two, three things.

Alan Arkin

#35. Truth is always unfolding. It's not an absolute.

Alan Arkin

#36. Things are never going to turn out how you think they will.

Alan Arkin

#37. Marriage requires searing honesty at all costs. I learned that from my third wife.

Alan Arkin

#38. 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. People think they have to have an answer for everything because the guys on TV have an answer for everything.

Alan Arkin

#39. I was a stoopball fan. I played stoopball all the time.

Alan Arkin

#40. I had a hard time treating my field as if it's horse racing, putting actors in competition against each other. I see how the industry and the studios feel it's important, but I don't really have a feeling for being in competition. I want to feel sympathetic and close to others, not opposed to them.

Alan Arkin

#41. It's - everybody's looking at the bottom line all the time, and failure doesn't look good on the bottom line, and yet you don't learn anything without failing.

Alan Arkin

#42. I never had a better role than I had in 'Little Miss Sunshine.' That was one of my favorite roles ever.

Alan Arkin

#43. I wrote my epitaph: He started out a particle and ended up a wave.

Alan Arkin

#44. Success has nothing to do with box office as far as I'm concerned. Success has to do with achieving your goals, your internal goals, and growing as a person. It would have been nice to have been connected with a couple more box office hits, but in the long run, I don't think it makes you happier.

Alan Arkin

#45. If you're playing a negative character, sooner or later it rubs off on you. Some people don't mind living in that state, but I don't want to be there anymore. I don't want to live in a state of depression.

Alan Arkin

#46. 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.

Alan Arkin

#47. But one of the things I learned from improvising is that all of life is an improvisation, whether you like it or not. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century came out of people dropping things.

Alan Arkin

#48. 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.

Alan Arkin

#49. It's murder to doubt yourself in life. It took until I was 45 to get to that point. As hard as it is in your work, it's harder in your life. But it can be done.

Alan Arkin

#50. NI love watching science fiction because I feel like when it's done well, it's not just monsters, but philosophy. Really good science fiction like, '2001,' for example, or the first 'Matrix.' But it takes someone who's got a brain and thinks in order to do really good science fiction.

Alan Arkin

#51. 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.

Alan Arkin

#52. I was terrified of being on stage, and I had to work very hard at a craft to get past that.

Alan Arkin

#53. Something I miss terribly from the '60s - the most important phrase in the English language was, 'I got hung up.' Somebody says they got hung up, it's unassailable, you know? You don't go near that. Whoa! I know what that can be like.

Alan Arkin

#54. 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. We might just as well let the rest of it go, join the party, and dance our hearts out.

Alan Arkin

#55. Is it possible to have an endless series of successes without falling on our faces? 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.

Alan Arkin

#56. Improvisation sometimes seemed more like jazz than acting, like verbal jazz, with the actors playing a theme back and forth, and then introducing another theme, incorporating it, somehow trying to work their way all together to a meaning of some kind, or at least a conclusion.

Alan Arkin

#57. 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.

Alan Arkin

#58. I don't know what I'm proudest of. The fact that my kids still talk to me.

Alan Arkin

#59. I love working if it's with people who are capable of having a good time. People with a little bit of enjoyment of what they do. If it's enormous pressure, and people feel that their lives are at stake, then it's agony. So I try to pick projects where I feel like I'm going to avoid those traps.

Alan Arkin

#60. My favorite thing about making movies is that it's the only area of human life that I've ever discovered where I can walk away from somebody in the middle of a conversation with somebody and they won't be offended.

Alan Arkin

#61. People think that the people in Hollywood have some master plan. They just make the movies that people go to see. I think it's that simple. I promise you if people were lining up around the block to see a Bible movie, they'd make Bible movies from now to the end of time.

Alan Arkin

#62. I'm very old. I haven't got time to be charming.

Alan Arkin

#63. I wanted to make it in New York. I thought if I went out to the Midwest, I'd be burying myself. But I was wrong.

Alan Arkin

#64. I want to feel like I'm doing something creative and trying different things, putting different hats on and playing. I don't know what's the point otherwise; otherwise, it's just a job. You punch a time clock.

Alan Arkin

#65. My favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinning.

Alan Arkin

#66. I would rather die than do a play - 10 years in solitary instead.

Alan Arkin

#67. [The business is] more corporate and more formulaic and less experiential.

Alan Arkin

#68. I did a couple of movies in Brazil, and the actors were incredibly congenial and hung out together a lot. Even the biggest stars would do radio commercials - they're not put on a pedestal like they are in the United States.

Alan Arkin

#69. My favorite thing is to be working with people I enjoy working with. I've reached the point where, emotionally, I don't need to act any more. Financially, I do. But emotionally, it wouldn't matter to me if I never acted again.

Alan Arkin

#70. 'Catch-22' was a huge failure, and it rubbed off on everybody connected to it. I had a bunch of lean years where I had to do things, a lot of which I wasn't wildly enthusiastic about.

Alan Arkin

#71. Unless you're doing Shakespeare or Chekhov ... the written word is not sacrosanct.

Alan Arkin

#72. I don't know why we have to put things in boxes of superlatives. That isolates them. Life is fluid, and the minute you start trying to put a line around something, it will deceive you and go away.

Alan Arkin

#73. The years I spent paying my dues are in the background, and so are my concerns about whether my performance is good or bad.

Alan Arkin

#74. I love insane, stupid comedy, but I can only make it work if it's a character I can give some history to and make real. Like the guy I played in 'Little Miss Sunshine.' He's a maniac, but to me he was absolutely believable.

Alan Arkin

#75. I'd have to say that my favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinning. 'Little Miss Sunshine' is like that. That's my fave genre, if I had to pick one.

Alan Arkin

#76. I don't believe in competitions between artists. This is insane. Who has the authority to say someone is better?

Alan Arkin

#77. You know what Andy Warhol's sole contribution to this country has been? He made Campbell's Soup a household word.

Alan Arkin

#78. A director without a vision is a catastrophe.

Alan Arkin

#79. I've always been an improviser. I was one before I knew even what the word was ... And acting, that I've been doing since I was 5.

Alan Arkin

#80. Things have got to add up to 100 points. The script is part of it, the character is part of it, the people I'm working with is the third part of it - and any combination of the three has got to add up to 100 points.

Alan Arkin

#81. Over the years, I played with a couple of spectacular guitar players, and playing with them has made me play better than I knew how to play. I hope the same thing is true with acting.

Alan Arkin

#82. I'm used to changing a lot of the dialogue. But if I feel like the script is working, I don't want to mess with it.

Alan Arkin

#83. A product is most easily sold when it has an identity. So they wrap you all up and put a label on you. 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.

Alan Arkin

#84. What I look for these days is that I don't have long speeches, the characters gets to sit down a lot, I don't have to learn any foreign languages, and it doesn't shoot in Minneapolis in February. That's mainly what I look for.

Alan Arkin

#85. 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.

Alan Arkin