Top 100 Kazan's Quotes
#1. 'A Face in the Crowd' is Elia Kazan's forgotten movie.
Peyton Reed
#2. 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
#3. What's called a difficult decision is a difficult decision because either way you go there are penalties.
Elia Kazan
#4. Too often in the theatre people can't wait for intermission to get some chocolate or something. But with Come Back, Little Sheba I just hope people leave feeling like they've spent a really good two-hours in that house with us.
Zoe Kazan
#5. Wonder is our need today, not information.
Elia Kazan
#6. But my family's really close and I was interested in what Mommy and Daddy did for a living. So when Mommy and Daddy had a script that wasn't totally age inappropriate, they would let me read it. And we would talk about it.
Zoe Kazan
#7. 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
#8. A good director's not sure when he gets on the set what he's going to do.
Elia Kazan
#9. I love bad movies, whereas going to the theater for me is a painful experience. I think it's really hard to sit and watch actors do something live and have it not go well.
Zoe Kazan
#10. I'm very pro-America, but I feel it necessary to keep in touch with Europe to maintain a perspective.
Elia Kazan
#11. I used to spend most of my time straining to be a nice guy so people would like me.
Elia Kazan
#12. My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.
Alex North
#13. I gave my life to the Group Theatre, because in it I'm building something for myself. What I build, I am.
Elia Kazan
#14. If you go to another male,I will kill him.That human tonight is lucky he's alive."
~Jayce Kazan
Katie Reus
#15. Take it from a director: if you get an actor that Sandy Meisner has trained, you've been blessed.
Elia Kazan
#16. We all have our essential nature. If you're good with numbers, you don't even know you're good with numbers because that's how your mind works.
Zoe Kazan
#17. I was the hero of the young insurgent working class art movement.
Elia Kazan
#18. I joined the Communist Party late in 1934. I got out a year and a half later.
Elia Kazan
#19. I knew the exuberance of playing before an admiring audience and hearing my secret voice.
Elia Kazan
#20. I was taken in by what might be called the Hard Times version of the Communists' advertising or recruiting technique.
Elia Kazan
#21. I think, a lot of times, directors assume that whatever they get from you the first time, whether it be at an audition or on set, is all that you can bring.
Zoe Kazan
#22. I'm used to very low-budget situations. In 'The Exploding Girl,' we were literally changing in Starbucks because we didn't have trailers.
Zoe Kazan
#23. I was the true future. I understood Communism better than they did.
Elia Kazan
#24. Someone said that once a family producers a writer, that's the end of the family.
Zoe Kazan
#25. My grandmother told me: "We all dated lots of different boys because no one was having sex or kissing. It was just going out for sodas and getting to know people. It didn't seem like there was a threat." I think now we have more ideas of people having premarital and unprotected sex.
Zoe Kazan
#26. You've got to keep fighting - you've got to risk your life every six months to stay alive.
Elia Kazan
#27. All in all, I think Kazan is Russia's sportiest city after Moscow, leaving all the others far behind.
Marat Safin
#28. I love to walk around New York. Honestly, that's like the best thing, to walk over to Park Slope and go visit my friend Betty and take her dog out in the park or go walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. I really dig being outside and getting to see everybody in the street.
Zoe Kazan
#29. Very often the Group actor is a critic when he's acting and an actor when he's criticizing.
Elia Kazan
#30. I read a lot of plays as a kid, but I didn't see that many plays, so I feel better-versed in film history and film structure. I just think it's easier to think in pictures.
Zoe Kazan
#31. I think most actors jump at the chance to do something where the camera's on them all the time.
Zoe Kazan
#32. You have no idea how fragile an actor's self-worth is.
Elia Kazan
#33. I was a student of Sanford Meisner for three years at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and I studied with Lee Strasburg for five years and became a member of the Actors Studio. What I studied came right from the horse's mouth. My students have a lot to learn from me, and I am so eager to share it.
Lainie Kazan
#34. A face, he believes, is a piece of sculpture that has taken a lifetime to mold, so it tells more than any actor's technique possibly could. I've watched Fellini work, and he did
Elia Kazan
#35. 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
#36. I feel lucky to receive such critical attention and praise when you're in a show that's going to last a month, it's just easier when audiences are more receptive. I've done two new shows this year, so I'm always excited to work on something a little older, traditional and structured.
Zoe Kazan
#37. You have to remind people of their own struggles. It's a responsibility.
Elia Kazan
#38. Half the fun is getting to play dress-up and imagine what it's like to be this other person. If you're not excited about a part where you get to use your imagination, then what's the point in doing it? It'll be just another job. Also, Director Michael Pressman and I see eye-to-eye with Marie.
Zoe Kazan
#39. And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, 'Hmm, there's half a page that's good here.' Then you throw out everything else.
Zoe Kazan
#40. I was not a collective person or a bohemian; I was an elitist.
Elia Kazan
#41. It's fun for me to be with someone who loves reading as much as I do, because he'll give me things to read that I wouldn't normally seek out, and I think vice versa.
Zoe Kazan
#42. So often you're asked to play impossibly perfect version of yourself on screen that it's nice to get to bring in those parts that you think aren't as worth looking at.
Zoe Kazan
#43. I forgive 'Face in the Crowd' its uneven tone because it's precisely what makes it feel unlike other Kazan movies.
Peyton Reed
#44. And when I get bored, it's like the worst parts of me come out. I really veer to self-destructive tendencies quickly.
Zoe Kazan
#45. The real challenge is not simply to survive. Hell, anyone can do that. It's to survive as yourself, undiminished.
Elia Kazan
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. If I'm not working, I don't feel complete.
Zoe Kazan
#51. 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
#52. I like directors who come on the set and create something that's a little dangerous, difficult or unusual.
Elia Kazan
#53. I think film writing, you're thinking in pictures, and stage writing, you're thinking in dialogue. In film writing, it's also, you only get so many words, so everything has to earn its place in a really economical way. I think for stage writing, you have more leeway.
Zoe Kazan
#54. In New York you can just walk out and be among people. You're on the subway among people, you go to cafes, you can talk to people.
Zoe Kazan
#55. I want to thank the Academy for its courage and generosity.
Elia Kazan
#56. The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal.
Elia Kazan
#57. 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
#58. Truth gets buried, that's why people write autobiographies.
Elia Kazan
#59. I don't have a lot of patience for boring arthouse movies.
Zoe Kazan
#60. I went to a lot of theatre. My parents were very involved with the performing arts. I went to nightclub shows when I was a little girl. We went to Florida and we would go to the Cocoanut Grove down there. We'd go see Lena Horne, Jimmy Durante, Sophie Tucker and Judy Garland.
Lainie Kazan
#61. 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
#62. I truly believe that all power corrupts. Such is probably the thinking behind every political film ever made in Hollywood.
Elia Kazan
#63. Nothing's going to come to you by sitting around and waiting for it.
Zoe Kazan
#64. I've definitely gotten to work with female directors, and I feel lucky because of that. I just feel like more voices should be represented.
Zoe Kazan
#65. I'm klutzy, and I don't embarrass easily.
Zoe Kazan
#66. I find playwriting really painful. I love it, or I wouldn't do it, but I don't love the theater as much as I love movies.
Zoe Kazan
#67. I'm always disappointed after an audition when I don't get a part and I hear, "Oh, she was too X, or too Y," and it's too much of a quality.
Zoe Kazan
#68. 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
#69. Criticism- a big bite out of someone's back.
Elia Kazan
#70. I didn't have that much confidence. Maybe it looks that way. I'm glad it does.
Elia Kazan
#71. Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
Elia Kazan
#72. When I look back, I can say that the summer when I was 19 was a formative time for me. But at the time I just thought I was making tofu every night for dinner and going to work.
Zoe Kazan
#73. Every picture that is successful has one little miracle in it.
Elia Kazan
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. Part of the challenge of being a girl living in the 21st Century, looking back, the danger is to not judge your character by your own standards.
Zoe Kazan
#77. Anybody who informs on other people is doing something disturbing and even disgusting.
Elia Kazan
#78. I think from my earliest childhood, I liked to tell stories, put on plays and write things. It's funny to think of it as an "artistic bug" because I didn't necessarily want to be an artist. It's just who I was and how I communicate.
Zoe Kazan
#79. The more ambivalent you are and the more uncertain you are, then you can get something that you cannot anticipate.
Elia Kazan
#80. Any writer can attest that in the luckiest, happiest state, the words are not coming from you, but through you.
Zoe Kazan
#81. Falling in love is an act of magic, so is writing.
Zoe Kazan
#82. I really love people. I love to meet people. I'm curious about people.
Zoe Kazan
#83. If I ever feel that acting is just soul-sucking and I don't want to do it anymore, I could stop.
Zoe Kazan
#84. I was very intense. I think it's a privilege to be an actor.
Elia Kazan
#85. My hero is Michelle Williams, who I grew close to when we did 'Meek's Cutoff.' She's an extraordinary actor and mom.
Zoe Kazan
#86. I love to act and that's sort of my first love. That's what I started out doing.
Zoe Kazan
#88. I'm small, but I'm neither compliant nor agreeable.
Elia Kazan
#90. I said to Tennessee, this thing is becoming the Marlon Brando show.
Elia Kazan
#91. I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays.
Zoe Kazan
#92. 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
#93. There aren't a lot of movies being made about women, period. Most of the time, the roles that are available are the sidekick, the friend, the girlfriend or the wife, and they just aren't that interesting.
Zoe Kazan
#94. Whatever hysteria exists is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it.
Elia Kazan
#95. I love singing. It's who I am. When I act, I take a small part of myself and just magnify it, but when I'm singing, that's who I am. I don't write music, so I choose songs that I would have written.
Lainie Kazan
#96. I think action should be revealed through character, so if you have a plot problem, it's probably a character problem.
Zoe Kazan
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. And I think the female creative urge is intrinsically biologically linked to our ability to give birth to a child, even if we've never ... I've never given birth, but I feel like it's part of our psychology.
Zoe Kazan
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
