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All Quotes by author - Ellen Burstyn

" All of my life I have asked the question, 'Who would I be if I had grown up in a loving home?' And I have no way to answer it. I don't know if I would be placid and satisfied with whatever is around me - a happy, jolly, sedentary person. "

" Directors tend to kind of let me do what I want to do. "

" I always wanted to play Joan of Arc. I've always wanted to do that. Now I'm thinking, 'Maybe there's a story in Joan of Arc's mother!' If I don't hurry up, her grandmother! "

" I couldn't kill a chicken, I couldn't kill a cow - I was a vegetarian too at that time - so I thought, well what is there that I could kill? I couldn't kill this and I couldn't kill that. "

" I did my famous cabbage soup diet, so I was able to do it. "

" I do like to work with young directors because it's such a difficult business that I think after directors have been around a while sometimes, not always, but sometimes their passion gets siphoned off because they get hurt. "

" I eat healthily and exercise, and I'm not giving up and saying I'm too old - I'm just determined to keep on marching with enthusiasm and interest and curiosity. "

" I feel compassion is so important to develop in ourselves. It's one of the most important elements of being a human being. "

" I feel eager to learn as much as I can, not only about my craft but the world and the cosmos and how we got here and whether there's any purpose to our being here. "

" I left my career in Hollywood, moved back to New York, and went to Lee Strasberg and studied with him for the rest of his life. "

" I'm always learning and trying new things. When you stop learning, you start dying. "

" I'm interested in the cosmos. I want to know what's out there and how connected we are. "

" I sketched out a rough story for them and the director said, well it's a good story but we have the go-ahead from Universal to make this script and did I want to do it. I said no, and they left. "

" I talked to women who lived there, to get their speech patterns and outlook on life - and how narrow that is. "

" It's about avoiding reality through various escape routes that become addictions and lead to Hell. My character is addicted to television, chocolate, coffee, to her dream of her son, which has no basis in reality. "

" It's a sin to have your films not to make money. "

" It's been awhile. My Oscar is getting kind of tarnished. I looked at it a couple of years ago and thought I really needed a new one. "

" It's interesting: John Calley at Warner Bros. helped me put 'Alice' together. It was very unusual back then for a studio to support an actress the way he backed and supported me. He even asked me if I wanted to direct the film, which I didn't feel prepared to at that point. "

" I've always wanted to work with my friend Al Pacino. "

" I've liked all the directors I've worked with a lot. And the ones I like best are the ones that have really good taste about what take was best. "

" I've lived most of my life in Manhattan, but as close as Brooklyn is to Manhattan, there are people who live there who have been to Manhattan maybe once or twice. "

" I've never done anything in my career that has gotten as much attention as 'House of Cards.' "

" I wanted to work on this central problem of killing. How you go about killing. Now, in the film I had to kill my children - well, I didn't want to get that far. "

" I was doing the work I was capable of doing with my own native talent, but when I looked at actors like Marlon Brando, Jimmy Dean, Kim Stanley, and Geraldine Page, I knew that they knew something that I didn't know. I wanted to find out what that was. "

" My mother was very glamorous. She was very beautiful, and she had a lot of friends; she was fun and loved to drink. "

" Nobody would want to leave that film to go get high. "

" She goes from one addiction to another. All are ways for her to not feel her feelings. "

" She loses 50 pounds in the film, and goes from fairly sane to totally out of her mind. So for the first part of the film I was wearing a 40 pound fat suit, which is very, very uncomfortable. But the worst part was the neck. "

" So I was at the Actor's Studio, thinking about this, and I happened to glance over to the other side of the stage and I saw the ugliest chair I have ever seen. And I thought, 'Well, I could kill that chair!' "

" The interesting thing about doing a play is to find a way to make it fresh and do it as though you were doing it for the first time. "

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