Top 100 Elia Quotes
#1. My heroes are guys like Frank Capra and Elia Kazan and Coen brothers and Terry Gilliam, more so than a lot of bass players at this point in my life. So I've always been an old-film nut and have very much enjoyed doing videos over the years.
Les Claypool
#2. Some directors, like Stevens [George Stevens], shoot full circle, 360 degrees, and that's what's right for them. I generally shoot at about a seven to one ratio. But part of that is because I've worked on every screenplay, so I'm further along in the visual concept.
Elia Kazan
#3. Every picture that is successful has one little miracle in it.
Elia Kazan
#4. Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
Elia Kazan
#5. I didn't have that much confidence. Maybe it looks that way. I'm glad it does.
Elia Kazan
#6. Criticism- a big bite out of someone's back.
Elia Kazan
#7. I won't go back to the theater. I like some of the things they're doing but it's different now, not something I could do. I'll go on making films the rest of my life.
Elia Kazan
#8. No perfume. Because I want to know how you smell - right off the bat. Don't mask it up. I need to know how you smell because I need to know how we connect. A smell is a big thing. Pheromones. Don't cover that.
Chris D'Elia
#9. I'm trying to use Palestine as a microcosm of the world, but maybe the world is a microcosm of Palestine. We're living in a moment that has lost attachment to the ideology behind boundaries.
Elia Suleiman
#10. I like directors who come on the set and create something that's a little dangerous, difficult or unusual.
Elia Kazan
#11. I truly believe that all power corrupts. Such is probably the thinking behind every political film ever made in Hollywood.
Elia Kazan
#12. Women, tend to talk more than men, and they do this thing where they say things that can easily be shown. Like, they don't need to do that.
Chris D'Elia
#13. Elia Kazan understood my problems. He was able to bring out the very best in me. He gave me credit for my intelligence.
Ethel Waters
#14. A lot of narrative films leave you no space for anything else but eating popcorn. I want to go in the complete opposite direction. I have to evacuate all psychology, to be less a protagonist and more a presence.
Elia Suleiman
#15. Truth gets buried, that's why people write autobiographies.
Elia Kazan
#16. To be a member of the Communist Party is to have a taste of the police state. It is a diluted taste but is bitter and unforgettable.
Elia Kazan
#17. 'A Face in the Crowd' is Elia Kazan's forgotten movie.
Peyton Reed
#18. The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal.
Elia Kazan
#19. I want to thank the Academy for its courage and generosity.
Elia Kazan
#20. The physical life of the scene is determined by whether the set squeezes people together or whether the set has an escape place in it.
Elia Kazan
#21. Miller didn't write Death of a Salesman. He released it. It was there inside him, waiting to be turned loose. That's the measure of its merit.
Elia Kazan
#22. With kids you can take a chance but casting a guy at 45 is different. You don't discover somebody that age. If an actor hasn't made it by that time he probably has no talent.
Elia Kazan
#23. Why write? Life is a cage of empty words.
Miriam Elia
#24. Whatever hysteria exists is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it.
Elia Kazan
#25. I got into a brawl one night in a saloon in Greenwich Village. Elia Kazan, a great director, saw me put out a couple of hecklers and figures there was some Big Daddy in me, just lyin' dormant. And out it came. People still do call me Big Daddy, but to me, inside, I'm no Big Daddy at all.
Burl Ives
#26. I said to Tennessee, this thing is becoming the Marlon Brando show.
Elia Kazan
#27. Anybody who informs on other people is doing something disturbing and even disgusting.
Elia Kazan
#28. I'm small, but I'm neither compliant nor agreeable.
Elia Kazan
#30. Men are seldom as they appear. You look so very guilty that I am convinced of your innocence. Still, you will likely be condemned. Justice is in short supply this side of the mountains. There has been none for Elia, Aegon, or Rhaenys. Why should there be any for you?
George R R Martin
#31. I was very intense. I think it's a privilege to be an actor.
Elia Kazan
#32. A girl who pays attention is very cool. It's really hard to pay attention to someone. I understand. I get it. I get bored a lot when I'm talking to people, but I try. So I'd like for the girl to try, too.
Chris D'Elia
#33. The more ambivalent you are and the more uncertain you are, then you can get something that you cannot anticipate.
Elia Kazan
#34. I was not a collective person or a bohemian; I was an elitist.
Elia Kazan
#35. You've got to keep fighting - you've got to risk your life every six months to stay alive.
Elia Kazan
#36. Once I started doing stand-up, everything fell into place. That was when I started acting more; I felt like I'd found my place in the business.
Chris D'Elia
#37. I was the true future. I understood Communism better than they did.
Elia Kazan
#38. I was taken in by what might be called the Hard Times version of the Communists' advertising or recruiting technique.
Elia Kazan
#39. I knew the exuberance of playing before an admiring audience and hearing my secret voice.
Elia Kazan
#40. I joined the Communist Party late in 1934. I got out a year and a half later.
Elia Kazan
#41. I was the hero of the young insurgent working class art movement.
Elia Kazan
#42. Take it from a director: if you get an actor that Sandy Meisner has trained, you've been blessed.
Elia Kazan
#43. I gave my life to the Group Theatre, because in it I'm building something for myself. What I build, I am.
Elia Kazan
#44. My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.
Alex North
#45. I used to spend most of my time straining to be a nice guy so people would like me.
Elia Kazan
#46. Every guy is different, but just prepare to know him in a different way and be OK with it, because the times I've lived with girls, and I've lived with some very sweet girls, I felt bad that they had to live with me.
Chris D'Elia
#47. I'm very pro-America, but I feel it necessary to keep in touch with Europe to maintain a perspective.
Elia Kazan
#48. A good director's not sure when he gets on the set what he's going to do.
Elia Kazan
#49. I have a bit of an obsession with the 1950's and all those actors from Montgomery Clift to James Dean and Anthony Perkins. Just that whole era of Tennessee Williams to Elia Kazan.
Sebastian Stan
#50. I don't really know what people's perception about Palestinians.All art is to better life. We want to create hope and share with others. Create more pleasure, and object to despair. Really it's about that. A space where we can be less aggressed upon.
Elia Suleiman
#51. Wonder is our need today, not information.
Elia Kazan
#52. I have no spy stories to tell, because I saw no spies. Nor did I understand, at that time, any opposition between American and Russian national interest.
Elia Kazan
#53. Jolly good!" ... King [George VI] exclaimed [after Queen Elizabeth fired the gun at Hitler's photograph]. "You got him right in the n-n-n-naughty bits."... "Good," she said. "That's where I was aiming.
Susan Elia MacNeal
#54. What's called a difficult decision is a difficult decision because either way you go there are penalties.
Elia Kazan
#55. The first thing you should do with an actor is not sign a contract with him. Take him to dinner. And take him for a walk afterwards.
Elia Kazan
#56. I hate the Communists and have for many years and don't feel right about giving up my career to defend them. I will give up my film career if it is in the interests of defending something I believe in, but not this.
Elia Kazan
#57. Whitney Cummings is one of the hardest working people I know, and she's very motivated.
Chris D'Elia
#58. I definitely am a performer, and there are different styles of stand-up; I mean, some people are writers and they get onstage to get jokes out, and that's definitely not what I do. I like to just go up and, if I'm telling a story about someone, I'll play his or her part.
Chris D'Elia
#59. People made suggestions, but, hell, I don't actually listen to anybody, I just go my own way.
Elia Kazan
#60. I know many of the critics and I don't think of them as God-like figures. What can they do to hurt me? Sure, I might be slightly embarrassed for a day, but then you just go your own way.
Elia Kazan
#61. For years after I resigned, I was still faithful to their way of thinking. But not in the American Communists.
Elia Kazan
#62. I was not what you'd call a first-class actor, but I did all right.
Elia Kazan
#63. There is only one thing I respect in so-called Broadway actors ... and that is their competitive sense.
Elia Kazan
#64. It's difficult, if not impossible, to get away with anything false before the camera. That instrument penetrates the husk of the actor; it reveals what's truly happening - if anything, if nothing. A close-up demands absolute truth. It's a severe and awesome truth
Elia Kazan
#65. When you know what an actor has, you can reach in and arouse it. If you don't know what he has, you don't know what the hell is going on.
Elia Kazan
#66. The camera is more than a recorder, it's a microscope. It penetrates, it goes into people and you see their most private and concealed thoughts.
Elia Kazan
#67. I was able to capture on film things the actors didn't even know they were doing.
Elia Kazan
#68. The only guy who was at all helpful as a producer was Sam Spiegel with On the Waterfront. He's one of the few who even knows what he's doing.
Elia Kazan
#69. The real challenge is not simply to survive. Hell, anyone can do that. It's to survive as yourself, undiminished.
Elia Kazan
#70. I'm not in the business of saying just one thing about just one place. If you only see Palestine in my films, then I've failed because then I'm just a provincial filmmaker.
Elia Suleiman
#71. Being on 'Whitney' is a job, but stand-up is my life. I could never stop. There's an art to it. I love having strangers laugh with me, so as long as I can continue doing that, I'll be happy. Working on a show and collectively sharing ideas with a cast is great, but stand-up is my first love.
Chris D'Elia
#72. I don't particularly have a good memory. I think history is many times just the text written by the victors. I wanted to counter that aspect.
Elia Suleiman
#73. There was no doubt that there was a vast organization which was making fools of all the liberals in Hollywood and taking their money, that there was a police state among the Left element in Hollywood and Broadway.
Elia Kazan
#74. I spoke without fear of contradiction. I simply did not suffer self-doubt.
Elia Kazan
#75. I've lost many of my best friends ... I'm going to satisfy myself now, not the critics, not even my friends.
Elia Kazan
#76. I owe Bankhead a gift; she made a director out of me.
Elia Kazan
#77. TV has made us get down to the nub and new films will begin to live up to what the medium can be.
Elia Kazan
#78. I would rather do what I did than crawl in front of a ritualistic Left and lie the way those other comrades did betray my own soul.
Elia Kazan
#79. The makers of entertainment must try, in our field, to be honest and grown-up.
Elia Kazan
#80. If you're going to play a cowboy, show up with the horse at the audition
Elia Kazan
#81. I don't remember anything anybody said in any Jack Ford picture. Nothing happens except action.
Elia Kazan
#82. I don't think there should be a Palestinian state because I don't believe in states.
Elia Suleiman
#83. I think there should be collaboration, but under my thumb.
Elia Kazan
#84. I was both very successful and very left; the living demonstration of how you could be on the left and still be in the gossip columns and be envied for the money you made.
Elia Kazan
#85. The belief that the good in American society will finally win out ... I don't believe any more.
Elia Kazan
#86. You can't just sit there and do the lines. You have to do something revealing or unusual.
Elia Kazan
#87. I never really feel like just standing there and telling jokes. I want to move around. In fact, it's hard for me to write a joke where I don't end up on the ground for some reason. Hey, at least that way, I know no comics will steal my jokes. Too many bruises.
Chris D'Elia
#88. If you pile up too many tomorrows, you'll end up with a lot of empty yesterdays.
Elia Gourgouris
#89. I was always a self-conscious person.
Elia Kazan
#90. Look for the contradictions in every character, especially in your heroes and villains. No one should be what they first seem to be. Surprise the audience.
Elia Kazan
#91. The thing with films is that you have to make something that will get people out of their houses, away from the TV set. You must touch people, say something. Otherwise, they'll stay at home.
Elia Kazan
#92. The Communists automatically violated the daily practices of democracy to which I was accustomed.
Elia Kazan
#93. You have to remind people of their own struggles. It's a responsibility.
Elia Kazan
#94. I was even superior to the Communists and when they didn't go along with me, I quit them.
Elia Kazan
#95. I will say nothing to an actor that cannot be translated into action.
Elia Kazan
#96. Our relationship was cursed by the fact that we agreed on everything.
Elia Kazan
#97. Hey, you must be doin' good, 'cause I never hear from you.
Elia Kazan
#98. I was an outsider ... but I was also sympathetic with people that were struggling to get up, because I struggled to get up.
Elia Kazan
#99. I wouldn't go up on a stage now if you paid a thousand dollars for one minute of acting. It's a nasty experience. You're up there all by yourself. You're so damn exposed.
Elia Kazan
#100. I try to use fiction in order to reduce the potentiality of something being true. We produce our own memories so I'm not sure of truth.
Elia Suleiman
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