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

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
Making
Living
Always
Burritos
Considered
Actor
Wasn
Actors

More quotes by Alan Arkin

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No matter what you do or where you are, you're going to be missing out on something.
Alan Arkin
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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.
Alan Arkin
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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
Alan Arkin
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I gotta keep busy. I'm not happy unless I'm working on two, three things.
Alan Arkin
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You know what Andy Warhol's sole contribution to this country has been? He made Campbell's Soup a household word.
Alan Arkin
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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
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My favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinning.
Alan Arkin
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If I'm doing a fake movie, it's gonna be a fake hit.
Alan Arkin
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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
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Marriage requires searing honesty at all costs. I learned that from my third wife.
Alan Arkin
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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.
Alan Arkin
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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.
Alan Arkin
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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
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[The business is] more corporate and more formulaic and less experiential.
Alan Arkin
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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
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Truth is always unfolding. It's not an absolute.
Alan Arkin
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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.
Alan Arkin
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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
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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.
Alan Arkin
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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