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Either you're growing or you're decaying there's no middle ground. If you're standing still, you're decaying.
Alan Arkin
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Alan Arkin
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: March 26
Actor
Character Actor
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Musician
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Singer
New York City
New York
Alan Wolf Arkin
Still
Decaying
Ground
Standing
Either
Middle
Growing
Stills
More quotes by Alan Arkin
'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.
Alan Arkin
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.
Alan Arkin
I don't believe in competitions between artists. This is insane. Who has the authority to say someone is better?
Alan Arkin
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.
Alan Arkin
I've always considered myself an actor, but I wasn't making a living as an actor.
Alan Arkin
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.
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.
Alan Arkin
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.
Alan Arkin
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.
Alan Arkin
I know that if I can't move people, then I have no business being an actor.
Alan Arkin
No matter what you do or where you are, you're going to be missing out on something.
Alan Arkin
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.
Alan Arkin
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.
Alan Arkin
If I'm doing a fake movie, it's gonna be a fake hit.
Alan Arkin
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.
Alan Arkin
Truth is always unfolding. It's not an absolute.
Alan Arkin
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.
Alan Arkin
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.
Alan Arkin
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.
Alan Arkin
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.
Alan Arkin
