Ellen Burstyn Quotes

#1. When you think of the 'Exorcist,' you think of Linda Blair and pea soup and all this madness, but really if you look at the first half of that film, the stuff between her and Ellen Burstyn is so naturalistic and so real.

Matt Reeves

#2. There is no difference between a rabid dog and a warmonger!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#3. Committing your thoughts and feelings to words is like putting your soul on a plate and hoping the diners will like what they eat.

Fennel Hudson

#4. They pulled Resurrection out of the theatres, so it was running in New York and I was nominated for the Oscar and there was no ad in the newspapers to say it was running. So it was literally killed.

Ellen Burstyn

#5. I talked to women who lived there, to get their speech patterns and outlook on life - and how narrow that is.

Ellen Burstyn

#6. It's about avoiding reality through various escape routes that become addictions and lead to Hell. My character is addicted to television, chocolate, coffee, to her dream of her son, which has no basis in reality.

Ellen Burstyn

#7. Regret is a toxin that I try not to allow in my body.

Ellen Burstyn

#8. I ignored the flashes of lightning all around me. They either had your number on them or they didn't.

J.D. Salinger

#9. To me, it's a very moral film. If my son were a teenager now, I would drag him to see it.

Ellen Burstyn

#10. Well my taste wasn't very good when I first started out. But later, when I began to appreciate the art of acting, I would say the actress I most admire is Vanessa Redgrave.

Ellen Burstyn

#11. Everything gets old if you do it often enough.

Ellen Burstyn

#12. I've lived most of my life in Manhattan, but as close as Brooklyn is to Manhattan, there are people who live there who have been to Manhattan maybe once or twice.

Ellen Burstyn

#13. I always wanted to play Joan of Arc. I've always wanted to do that. Now I'm thinking, 'Maybe there's a story in Joan of Arc's mother!' If I don't hurry up, her grandmother!

Ellen Burstyn

#14. She loses 50 pounds in the film, and goes from fairly sane to totally out of her mind. So for the first part of the film I was wearing a 40 pound fat suit, which is very, very uncomfortable. But the worst part was the neck.

Ellen Burstyn

#15. It's a sin to have your films not to make money.

Ellen Burstyn

#16. Then in came this script with another very low offer, and another drug addict and a depressing and difficult part to play. I thought, 'Why should I put myself through that for hardly any money?'

Ellen Burstyn

#17. Nobody would want to leave that film to go get high.

Ellen Burstyn

#18. Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress.

Nicholas M. Butler

#19. But no one who is lost has lost one ounce of value to God. Even if you don't have a relationship with him, you have immense value to God.

Rick Warren

#20. What a lovely surprise to finally discover how unlonely being alone can be.

Ellen Burstyn

#21. Their life is about getting enough money to put food on the table to feed their children, and that's it.

Ellen Burstyn

#22. I wish I was taller or curvier, but I'm happy with the way I look.

Sarah Hyland

#23. I wanted to work on this central problem of killing. How you go about killing. Now, in the film I had to kill my children - well, I didn't want to get that far.

Ellen Burstyn

#24. Anyone who calls my music "impressionist" is an imbecile.

Claude Debussy

#25. When you recognize what your talents are, a happy life is developing them to the greatest extent you can.

Ellen Burstyn

#26. I couldn't kill a chicken, I couldn't kill a cow - I was a vegetarian too at that time - so I thought, well what is there that I could kill? I couldn't kill this and I couldn't kill that.

Ellen Burstyn

#27. I sketched out a rough story for them and the director said, well it's a good story but we have the go-ahead from Universal to make this script and did I want to do it. I said no, and they left.

Ellen Burstyn

#28. Well, it takes all kinds to make a mess.

Benjamin Hoff

#29. I do like to work with young directors because it's such a difficult business that I think after directors have been around a while sometimes, not always, but sometimes their passion gets siphoned off because they get hurt.

Ellen Burstyn

#30. Nothing beats standing in the middle of the action, with all the data I need at my fingertips

Betty Liu

#31. She goes from one addiction to another. All are ways for her to not feel her feelings.

Ellen Burstyn

#32. I did my famous cabbage soup diet, so I was able to do it.

Ellen Burstyn

#33. The interesting thing about doing a play is to find a way to make it fresh and do it as though you were doing it for the first time.

Ellen Burstyn

#34. So I was at the Actor's Studio, thinking about this, and I happened to glance over to the other side of the stage and I saw the ugliest chair I have ever seen. And I thought, 'Well, I could kill that chair!'

Ellen Burstyn

#35. It's been awhile. My Oscar is getting kind of tarnished. I looked at it a couple of years ago and thought I really needed a new one.

Ellen Burstyn