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" 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. "
Ellen Burstyn
Brooklyn
People
Life
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" 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. "
Ellen Burstyn
Mind
Fat
She
" I'm always learning and trying new things. When you stop learning, you start dying. "
Ellen Burstyn
New Things
Trying
You
" I talked to women who lived there, to get their speech patterns and outlook on life - and how narrow that is. "
Ellen Burstyn
Patterns
Women
Speech
" 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! "
Ellen Burstyn
Play
Mother
Always
" 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. "
Ellen Burstyn
Children
You
Work
" When we did 'The Last Picture Show,' the whole cast was unknowns, and we all got careers from it. Well, I don't think this could be done now. "
Ellen Burstyn
Show
Picture
Now
" 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. "
Ellen Burstyn
Hurt
Work
Think
" 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. "
Ellen Burstyn
Son
Character
Reality
" 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. "
Ellen Burstyn
Good Taste
Like
Good
" What a lovely surprise to finally discover how unlonely being alone can be. "
Ellen Burstyn
Surprise
Alone
Lovely
" 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. "
Ellen Burstyn
World
Purpose
Learn
" They pulled Resurrection out of the theatres, so it was running in New York and I was nominated for the Oscar and there was no ad in the newspapers to say it was running. So it was literally killed. "
Ellen Burstyn
New
New York
Say
" 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. "
Ellen Burstyn
Chicken
Vegetarian
Time
" The only Shakespeare I ever did was a production of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' two years in a row in my garden in Rockland County on the Hudson River in the 1980s. I had all the actors from the Actors Studio come out, and we made our own costumes. "
Ellen Burstyn
Dream
Night
Two
" The real work of an actor goes on inside, and I don't think it changes from director to director - I always go for broke! But I don't get a lot of direction, unfortunately. "
Ellen Burstyn
Direction
Think
Changes
" I'm interested in the cosmos. I want to know what's out there and how connected we are. "
Ellen Burstyn
How
Know
Out
" Directors tend to kind of let me do what I want to do. "
Ellen Burstyn
Kind
Tend
Me
" When I was 19, I took a train from Houston to New York, and I had in my lap the collected works of William Shakespeare. The play I read on that journey was 'Titus Andronicus.' "
Ellen Burstyn
Journey
Train
Play
" I feel compassion is so important to develop in ourselves. It's one of the most important elements of being a human being. "
Ellen Burstyn
Human
Feel
Important
" 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. "
Ellen Burstyn
Me
My Life
Happy
" 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!' "
Ellen Burstyn
Chair
Actor
Stage
" What happens is you submit your script with an idea of what the budget might be, and the financier will offer you less than that. In order to do it for less, it means cutting out the art, usually. "
Ellen Burstyn
You
Your
Art
" 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. "
Ellen Burstyn
Back
Rest
New York
" 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. "
Ellen Burstyn
Said
Want
Left
" 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. "
Ellen Burstyn
Way
You
Time
" My mother was very glamorous. She was very beautiful, and she had a lot of friends; she was fun and loved to drink. "
Ellen Burstyn
Fun
Beautiful
Friends
" 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. "
Ellen Burstyn
Getting
Kind
Years
" I've never done anything in my career that has gotten as much attention as 'House of Cards.' "
Ellen Burstyn
House
Cards
Career
" We can all live longer, better, than we ever could before. You don't have to retire. "
Ellen Burstyn
Than
Better
Live
" 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. "
Ellen Burstyn
Find
Work
Talent