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" 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. "

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" 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

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

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

" Their life is about getting enough money to put food on the table to feed their children, and that's it. "

" There's no doubt that the patriarchy that we live in also controls the movie industry. The heads of the studios are men, and it's reflected in the scripts they buy and the work that gets made. "

" 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. "

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

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

Ellen Burstyn

Kind

Tend

" 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.' "

" 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. "

Ellen Burstyn

Interesting

Feel

" 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. "

" 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

My Life

Happy

" Today, people like Reese Witherspoon and Meryl Streep have vowed to improve the opportunities for women, but those promises are still unusual. "

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

" 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! "

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

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

" 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'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 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

Good

" What a lovely surprise to finally discover how unlonely being alone can be. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" With 'The Last Picture Show,' Peter Bogdanovich brought the script to the company that made it. They liked it, and they gave him the money he needed to make the film. He cast it with the actors that he thought were right for the parts. Now, it's the reverse. "

" To me, it's a very moral film. If my son were a teenager now, I would drag him to see it. "

Ellen Burstyn

See

Moral

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