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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. "

Alan Arkin

People

Think

Human

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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. "

" I know that if I can't move people, then I have no business being an actor. "

" NI love watching science fiction because I feel like when it's done well, it's not just monsters, but philosophy. Really good science fiction like, '2001,' for example, or the first 'Matrix.' But it takes someone who's got a brain and thinks in order to do really good science fiction. "

" Over the years, I played with a couple of spectacular guitar players, and playing with them has made me play better than I knew how to play. I hope the same thing is true with acting. "

" 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. "

" I would like to have a movie under my own control sometime, and see what could be done with it. Who knows? Maybe Hollywood will make an improvisational movie someday. "

" It's murder to doubt yourself in life. It took until I was 45 to get to that point. As hard as it is in your work, it's harder in your life. But it can be done. "

" 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. "

" I gotta keep busy. I'm not happy unless I'm working on two, three things. "

" I don't know what I'm proudest of. The fact that my kids still talk to me. "

Alan Arkin

Fact

Talk

" That's the privilege of old age: You don't have to remember. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" You hit a certain age, and you haven't died yet, and you become an elder statesman. I think I get a lot of applause because I'm not keeling over. "

" Something I miss terribly from the '60s - the most important phrase in the English language was, 'I got hung up.' Somebody says they got hung up, it's unassailable, you know? You don't go near that. Whoa! I know what that can be like. "

Alan Arkin

Language

You

" 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. "

" I never had a better role than I had in 'Little Miss Sunshine.' That was one of my favorite roles ever. "

" I don't care about names attached to the script. That doesn't matter to me. All things being equal, I would like to work with a good script with a good director, and the part I play is of less important than those two factors. "

" I'd have to say that my favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinning. 'Little Miss Sunshine' is like that. That's my fave genre, if I had to pick one. "

" You have to think of your career the way you look at the ocean, deciding which wave you're gonna take and which waves you're not gonna take. Some of the waves are going to be big, some are gonna be small, sometimes the sea is going to be calm. Your career is not going to be one steady march upward to glory. "

" A director without a vision is a catastrophe. "

" My father was a painter. There was a lot of singing. We hung around with a lot of folk musicians. My family knew a lot of great folk musicians of the time, like Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Leadbelly. They were all people we knew. "

" For everybody, the tide comes in, the tide goes out - if you're an actor, particularly. "