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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

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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
Life
Scientific
Like
Discovery
People
Learned
Century
Greatest
Improvising
Came
Improvisation
Whether
Discoveries
Things
Dropping

More quotes by Alan Arkin

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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.
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I've always considered myself an actor, but I wasn't making a living as an actor.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Truth is always unfolding. It's not an absolute.
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[The business is] more corporate and more formulaic and less experiential.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Marriage requires searing honesty at all costs. I learned that from my third wife.
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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.
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My favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinning.
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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.
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If I'm doing a fake movie, it's gonna be a fake hit.
Alan Arkin
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Things are never going to turn out how you think they will.
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'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.
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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.
Alan Arkin