Elia Kazan Quotes

89 quotes in 986 categories

• You've got to keep fighting; you've got to risk your life every six months to stay alive.
• The real challenge is not simply to survive. Hell, anyone can do that. It’s to survive as yourself, undiminished.
• I was the hero of the young insurgent working class art movement.
• I was able to capture on film things the actors didn't even know they were doing.
• 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…
• Take it from a director: if you get an actor that Sandy Meisner has trained, you've been blessed.
• 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.
• If you're going to play a cowboy, show up with the horse at the audition
• Every picture that is successful has one little miracle in it.
• The belief that the good in American society will finally win out... I don't believe any more.
• The essence of the stage is concentration and penetration. Of the screen action, movement, sweep.
• I've lost many of my best friends... I'm going to satisfy myself now, not the critics, not even my friends.
• Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
• 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…
• I question the value of stars. I think they're overrated. They get too much money, too much praise.
• I was always a self-conscious person.
• 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…
• I was not a collective person or a bohemian; I was an elitist.
• I was not what you'd call a first-class actor, but I did all right.
• I was very intense. I think it's a privilege to be an actor.

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