Alan Arkin

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

“That's the privilege of old age: You don't have to remember.”

“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.”

“I was terrified of being on stage, and I had to work very hard at a craft to get past that.”

“'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.”

“Unless you're doing Shakespeare or Chekhov... the written word is not sacrosanct.”

“My favorite thing about making movies is that it's the only area of human life that I've ever discovered where I can walk away from somebody in the middle of a conversation with somebody and they won't be offended.”

“Everybody's career has ups and downs. I like to take chances; I don't like to stand still. And I don't give a damn what the market is interested in; I want to try things.”

“I don't know why we have to put things in boxes of superlatives. That isolates them. Life is fluid, and the minute you start trying to put a line around something, it will deceive you and go away.”

“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.”

“I had to jump around in the arts for a while just to survive. I earned a little money here and there, playing the guitar at union meetings, functions. I sold some science-fiction stories. I knew there was absolutely no question of me not being connected with the arts, but I couldn't find any acting jobs.”

“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.”

“The years I spent paying my dues are in the background, and so are my concerns about whether my performance is good or bad.”

“I don't mind watching plays once in a while, but as long as I don't have to be in them.”

“I'm used to changing a lot of the dialogue. But if I feel like the script is working, I don't want to mess with it.”

“I've always been an improviser. I was one before I knew even what the word was... And acting, that I've been doing since I was 5.”

“I don't sense that I am someone's hero, though I'm happy when people like my work. I've learned how to be gracious about it, but I try to let it go by. I've seen how, if people start taking on those accolades, it can ruin them completely.”

“There have been times when I've been broke, and a job came along, and I've said, 'Yeah! Let's do it!' But I will never do something without having a feeling of knowing how to play it. I've been in projects that I felt terrible about afterwards, but I've always had something that sparked me while I was doing it.”

“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 of great folk musicians of the time, like Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Leadbelly. They were all people we knew.”

“I love working if it's with people who are capable of having a good time. People with a little bit of enjoyment of what they do. If it's enormous pressure, and people feel that their lives are at stake, then it's agony. So I try to pick projects where I feel like I'm going to avoid those traps.”