Alan Arkin Quotes

I know that if I can't move people, then I have no business being an actor.

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 the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century came out of people dropping things.

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 work, it's harder in your life. But it can be done.

I don't believe there's anything in life you can't go back and fix. The ancient Vedas - the oldest Hindu philosophy - and modern science agree that time is an illusion. If that's true, there's no such thing as a past or a future - it's all one huge now. So what you fix now affects the past and the future.

For many years my acting came from a place of surmounting some enormous obstacle, confronting some stern and faceless judge who would condemn me to a pit of hell if I didn't achieve the "zone," if even for a moment. Not a particularly happy place to work from.

You can begin to see an amalgamation of cultures, the real beginning of one world. Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a Cockney singing group with a Southern Negro style and Indian and electronic music. I wonder if people have even noticed what a tremendous cultural signal the Beatles are.

That's what we're all doing, all the time, whether we know it or not. Whether we like it or not. Creating something on the spur of the moment with the materials at hand. We might just as well let the rest of it go, join the party, and dance our hearts out.

Marriage requires searing honesty at all costs. I learned that from my third wife.

I don't believe in competitions between artists. This is insane. Who has the authority to say someone is better?

Truth is always unfolding. It's not an absolute.

I read somewhere that some people believe that the entire universe is a matrix of living thought. And I said, "Man, if that's not a definition of God, I don't know what is.

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 certain things didn't move me, and I tried to analyze, even at that age, six and seven and eight, why I was moved by certain things they did

I don't love the business. I never wanted to be a part of it. I don't think any actor does. Most of the time, I've been really fortunate to work with people who are really fun to work with. It doesn't mean we don't take it seriously, but no one is under the delusion (that we're) bringing world peace.

Either you're growing or you're decaying; there's no middle ground. If you're standing still, you're decaying.

No matter what you do or where you are, you're going to be missing out on something.

I don't live in L.A. on purpose because I don't wanna be immersed in that. I have to have a real life, with real people, in order to inform what I'm doing; otherwise, it just becomes the snake eating its own tail. Vampirism.

I played guitar. I've always considered myself an actor, but I wasn't making a living as an actor. So I was in a couple of folk groups that managed to keep me in underwear and burritos.

You know what Andy Warhol's sole contribution to this country has been? He made Campbell's Soup a household word.

[The business is] more corporate and more formulaic and less experiential.

'Catch-22' was a huge failure, and it rubbed off on everybody connected to it. I had a bunch of lean years where I had to do things, a lot of which I wasn't wildly enthusiastic about.

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 not mean jamming information into somebody's head. Rather, it's that ancient idea that all knowledge is within us; to teach is to help somebody pull it out of themselves.

Hollywood is a strange place. The class structure here is more rigid than almost anyplace I've ever experienced. It's made more difficult by the fact that it's constantly changing. You never know what class you belong to unless you're one of the two or three people that have been in the same echelon for a long, long time.

I gotta keep busy. I'm not happy unless I'm working on two, three things.

Things are never going to turn out how you think they will.

All I can say is if the part doesn't delight me in some way, or I can't feel any compassion for it, I just can't do it.

My favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinning.

If you want to be an actor and you love acting, you can do it whether you're doing something else or not. You can be connected with community theater or make your own little movies. But, if you want to be a movie star, you've got a tough road ahead of you.

I've always considered myself an actor, but I wasn't making a living as an actor.

TV has taken reflection out of the human condition. People didn't use to have a ready answer for everything, whether they knew something about it or not. People think they have to have an answer for everything because the guys on TV have an answer for everything. But it's bullsh**t! Reflection is crucial.

I don't think it does the audience any good to know what I do to prepare. It keeps it more of a surprise. I don't feel like it has to be a mystery.

There's a familiarity that sometimes shocks and annoys the hell out of me. People want a relationship with you that they haven't earned.

I'm an actor. My life as an actor depends on who sends me what. I'm just taking the best stuff that I can find that's sent my way, regardless of how big or little the paycheck is. I don't want to work for scale anymore. I'm at a point now where, no matter how good something is, I'm not going to kill myself and end up in the hole.

Is it possible to have an endless series of successes without falling on our faces? I suppose it is, but I think it would entail doing the same things over and over again without taking chances, without taking risks or exploring our limits, without finding out what we can and can't do.

Improvisation sometimes seemed more like jazz than acting, like verbal jazz, with the actors playing a theme back and forth, and then introducing another theme, incorporating it, somehow trying to work their way all together to a meaning of some kind, or at least a conclusion.

Creativity means learning where the rules exist, and then breaking them! Saying, "It's better this way." But you have to know the rules in order to break them with any grace.

Two-thirds of American movies are extensions of commercials -- they tell you how to feel and they tell you how to think -- rather than letting you figure it out on your own.

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.

Every physicist knows that things connect with each other. To isolate things is not the way the universe works - winning best actor is arbitrary.

A product is most easily sold when it has an identity. So they wrap you all up and put a label on you. And then that's what you have to be. But what I'm looking for is the opportunity to explore what I can do, probing the limits, learning.

If I'm doing a fake movie, it's gonna be a fake hit.

I had a hard time treating my field as if it’s horse racing, putting actors in competition against each other. I see how the industry and the studios feel it’s important, but I don’t really have a feeling for being in competition. I want to feel sympathetic and close to others, not opposed to them.