Uta Quotes

#1. Uta Hagen is our greatest living actor; she is, moreover, interested and mystified by the presence of talent and its workings; her third gift is a passion to communicate the mysteries of the craft to which she has given her life. There are almost no American actors uninfluenced by her.

Fritz Weaver

#2. I had three influential teachers. The first was Uta Hagen. The second two, Bobby Lewis and my late husband, Charles Kakatsakis, were both from the Actors Studio.

June Squibb

#3. Said Gilgamesh to him, to Uta-napishti the Distant:
'O Uta-napishti, what should I do and where should I go?
A thief has taken hold of my flesh!
For there in my bed-chamber Death does abide,
and wherever I turn, there too will be Death.

Anonymous

#4. Life is brief, young maiden, fall in love; before the crimson bloom fades from your lips, before the tides of passion cool within your hips, for those of you who know no tomorrow. (Gondola no Uta)

Kouhei Kadono

#5. Uta Hagen would say, there's the representational actor and the presentational actor.

Jake Gyllenhaal

#6. They still had the Lord Chamberlain, so we had this idiotic censorship. We were allowed three Jesus Christs instead of 10. Why three were OK, I don't know.

Uta Hagen

#7. Sexual pessimism and hostility toward the pleasures of the flesh are a legacy from the ancient world which Christianity has preserved in a special measure to this day.

Uta Ranke-Heinemann

#8. Talent is an amalgam of high sensitivity; easy vulnerability; high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting intensely); a vivid imagination as well as a grip on reality; the desire to communicate one's own experience and sensations, to make one's self heard and seen.

Uta Hagen

#9. I can neither live with you. Nor without you.

Sui Ishida

#10. I am interested in the conventions of picture-making, in the desire to picture the world and in our relationship, our continual love for and fascination with pictures.

Uta Barth

#11. I love playing Chekhov. That's the hardest; that's why I love it most.

Uta Hagen

#12. Usually, someone who's in a show gets me a ticket. I feel cornered. I can't walk out if I don't like it.

Uta Hagen

#13. Working with Brando was fun. It was like a tennis match. We played unbelievably well together.

Uta Hagen

#14. One cannot demand of art that it pay you in any other way than in the satisfaction of the work itself.

Uta Hagen

#15. Marlon was so sensitive, you thought the poor guy just had a bad education.

Uta Hagen

#16. Thoughts and feelings are suspended in a vacuum unless they instigate and feed the selected actions, and it is the characters actions which reveal the character in the play.

Uta Hagen

#17. I have disassociated myself from that book.

Uta Hagen

#18. I love going to the movies; I love watching good movie actors. They must know something I don't.

Uta Hagen

#19. The knowledge that every day there is something more to learn, something higher to reach for, something new to make for others, makes each day infinitely precious

Uta Hagen

#20. Maybe the one I enjoyed playing most was A Month in the Country.

Uta Hagen

#21. Specificity of time and place drop away and one starts to think about the picture, as much as what it is of.

Uta Barth

#22. Awards don't really mean much.

Uta Hagen

#23. I have never been interested in making a photograph that describes what the world I live in looks like, but I am interested in what pictures (of the world) look like.

Uta Barth

#24. We need to have a mask that we never take off.

Sui Ishida

#25. The need to be loved and protected is at a peak when we feel abandoned and are particularly vulnerable to difficult circumstances.

Uta Hagen

#26. We must overcome the notion that we must be regular ... it robs you of the chance to be extraordinary and leads you to the mediocre.

Uta Hagen

#27. I definitely want to show how beautiful the marathon can be. I am the opponent of all those who find the marathon bad: the psychologists, the physiologists, the doubters. I make the marathon beautiful for myself and for others. That's why I'm here.

Uta Pippig

#28. It must be noted that it is often the colleague or direct disciple of a new thinker who gets stuck in literal interpretations of the work, tending to freeze the new ideas and language into an inflexible, static condition.

Uta Hagen

#29. Jesus was a friend of women, the first and practically the last friend women had in the church.

Uta Ranke-Heinemann

#30. We were not allowed to say, Screw, but we could say, Hump the hostess, because hump is in Shakespeare.

Uta Hagen

#31. Life is short, so fall in love.

Arina Tanemura

#32. No work of art is ever finished, nothing is ever static, no performance is for keeps.

Uta Hagen

#33. Everything is pointing to one's own activity of looking, to an awareness and sort of hyper-consciousness of visual perception. The only way I know how to invite this experience is by removing the other things (i.e., subject matter) for you to think about.

Uta Barth

#34. All tedious research is worth one inspired moment.

Uta Hagen

#35. Once in awhile, there's stuff that makes me say, That's what theatre's about. It has to be a human event on the stage, and that doesn't happen very often.

Uta Hagen

#36. Keep pace with the present. Take a trip to the moon. envision the future.

Uta Hagen

#37. I think, by and large, the level of acting is mediocre. When I go to the theatre, I get so angry. I don't go.

Uta Hagen

#38. To rebel or revolt against the status quo is in the very nature of an artist.

Uta Hagen

#39. I won't go to England because they won't let my dog in.

Uta Hagen

#40. My work never directly addresses the literal subject matter of the photograph, but attempts to ask questions about vision itself.

Uta Barth

#41. I'm a bad liar; I don't know what to say backstage.

Uta Hagen

#42. If you want a bourgeois existence, you shouldn't be an actor. You're in the wrong profession.

Uta Hagen

#43. We had a relationship that lasted 44 years. Herbert and I lived together 10 years before we were married. He always gave me a little heart for whatever anniversary.

Uta Hagen