Alan Arkin People Quotations

I love working if it's with people who are capable of having a good time. People with a little bit of enjoyment of what they do. If it's enormous pressure, and people feel that their lives are at stake, then it's agony. So I try to pick projects where I feel like I'm going to avoid those traps.

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.

I don't sense that I am someone's hero, though I'm happy when people like my work. I've learned how to be gracious about it, but I try to let it go by. I've seen how, if people start taking on those accolades, it can ruin them completely.

I love doing kids' shows, and I love working with kids. I've done a lot of it. A lot of people don't like working with children, but I love it.

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

Things have got to add up to 100 points. The script is part of it, the character is part of it, the people I'm working with is the third part of it - and any combination of the three has got to add up to 100 points.

If you're playing a negative character, sooner or later it rubs off on you. Some people don't mind living in that state, but I don't want to be there anymore. I don't want to live in a state of depression.

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

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.

My favorite thing is to be working with people I enjoy working with. I've reached the point where, emotionally, I don't need to act any more. Financially, I do. But emotionally, it wouldn't matter to me if I never acted again.

People think that the people in Hollywood have some master plan. They just make the movies that people go to see. I think it's that simple. I promise you if people were lining up around the block to see a Bible movie, they'd make Bible movies from now to the end of time.

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.

There's a familiarity that sometimes shocks and annoys the hell out of me. People want a relationship with you that they haven't earned.

You can begin to see an amalgamation of cultures, the real beginning of one world. Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a Cockney singing group with a Southern Negro style and Indian and electronic music. I wonder if people have even noticed what a tremendous cultural signal the Beatles are.