Alan Arkin Quotes

22 quotes in 315 categories

• Either you're growing or you're decaying; there's no middle ground. If you're standing still, you're decaying.
• 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…
• I know that if I can't move people, then I have no business being an actor.
• "What I've learned about teaching is to refer back to the root of that word, which is educo, which means "to pull from." Education does…
• 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.
• No matter what you do or where you are, you're going to be missing out on something.
• 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…
• If I'm going to make a fake movie, it's going to be a fake hit.
• Marriage requires searing honesty at all costs. I learned that from my third wife.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• I was terrified of being on stage, and I had to work very hard at a craft to get past that.
• A director without a vision is a catastrophe.
• I used to have a lot of philosophies of acting; they all fell apart over the years.
• I wrote my epitaph: He started out a particle and ended up a wave.
• I was a stoopball fan. I played stoopball all the time.
• The years I spent paying my dues are in the background, and so are my concerns about whether my performance is good or bad.
• 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…
• Every physicist knows that things connect with each other. To isolate things is not the way the universe works - winning best actor is arbitrary.

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