I know that if I can’t move people, then I have no business being an actor.
-Alan Arkin
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.
-Alan Arkin
That’s what we’re all doing, all the time, whether we know it or not. Whether we like it or not. Creating something on the spur of the moment with the materials at hand. We might just as well let the rest of it go, join the party, and dance our hearts out.
-Alan Arkin
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.
-Alan Arkin
Truth is always unfolding. It’s not an absolute.
-Alan Arkin
Either you’re growing or you’re decaying; there’s no middle ground. If you’re standing still, you’re decaying.
-Alan Arkin
Things are never going to turn out how you think they will.
-Alan Arkin
For many years my acting came from a place of surmounting some enormous obstacle, confronting some stern and faceless judge who would condemn me to a pit of hell if I didn’t achieve the “zone,” if even for a moment. Not a particularly happy place to work from.
-Alan Arkin
I gotta keep busy. I’m not happy unless I’m working on two, three things.
-Alan Arkin
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.
-Alan Arkin
Marriage requires searing honesty at all costs. I learned that from my third wife.
-Alan Arkin
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.
-Alan Arkin
No matter what you do or where you are, you’re going to be missing out on something.
-Alan Arkin
My favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinning.
-Alan Arkin
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
-Alan Arkin
If you want to be an actor and you love acting, you can do it whether you’re doing something else or not. You can be connected with community theater or make your own little movies. But, if you want to be a movie star, you’ve got a tough road ahead of you.
-Alan Arkin
I don’t believe in competitions between artists. This is insane. Who has the authority to say someone is better?
-Alan Arkin
I’ve always considered myself an actor, but I wasn’t making a living as an actor.
-Alan Arkin
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. But it’s bullsh**t! Reflection is crucial.
-Alan Arkin
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