Anton Yelchin Quotations

I prefer when movies target my heart instead of my mind.

There's only a handful of people I trust completely, and I know who they are. Other than that, I pretty much don't trust people.

The ability to have a choice in what you do is a privilege.

I'm not passive aggressive. If something bothers me, I think about it, then I act on it. I express it.

My parents were of the opinion, because they had started skating very young, that you should have something that you do that you care about, because it structures your life as you're growing up.

In a relationship when things are really great you don't need to say anything and just enjoy the other person. Sometimes with a couple, it gets dark and you don't know what to say and that silence can last all day. Other times you don't want to stop talking because you don't want to lose one another.

Teenagers are like atoms when they're moving at hundreds of miles an hour and bouncing off each other. Everybody's got such a crazy hormonal drive and reacting to each other differently and getting upset over little things. High school puts all these potential explosions in one place.

Every relationship I've been in becomes long-distance because of work. It's never worked out. It puts an intense strain on the relationship, and at a certain point, it becomes too difficult.

My playing music is strictly for fun. When I was in a band, I was really excited to talk about it since I had never really played music to that extent. It was never meant as something I would consider as anything more than having fun with my friends. But I think I would enjoy writing music for the movies that I'm working on.

If you want to make movies you need to think on a micro-micro level and figure out how to make them for nothing with people who really care about your movie and really want to make it.

I'm actually embarrassed to tell people I'm Russian these days, because it's become such an awful place.

I want things to be characters and not me. Why would I want to play me?

I think you can always find interesting, complex and fascinating characters to play in different kinds of movies. It's in your hands.

Russia itself is an extremely complex country, and sometimes I feel like all of that comes back to haunt me. I can see why so many Russian writers were so tortured.

Maybe silence is something we're uncomfortable with as a culture, I don't know.

I feel lucky to be in whatever I'm in. I feel lucky to be working.

It would be nice to live off the land and fix cars.

I'm fascinated by how ethnic communities have assimilated into massive capitalist environments.

I don't hang out at trendy Hollywood bars.

One of my favorite vampire movies is 'Nosferatu,' which has a palpable sense of dread that's a pre-war dread.

I love academics, theory and all that. I love and admire that and try to do as much reading as I can.

I tried ice-skating and wasn't very good at it.

I've been lucky to be able to work with great people and on interesting material.

I've been lucky to play characters that are really broad.

When you don't understand the fashion world you're just grateful you get to wear good clothes.

Most of the girls I know are from my school. I've gone to school with the same people since fourth grade, so I can't wait to go to a place where I don't know anybody.

I don't feel any connection to Russia.

Communism destroyed so many generations. I look at my grandparents and their generation, and it's as if their lives were taken from them. It's really sad and frightening that something like that could have happened. But I don't really think of myself as Russian anymore. I didn't even live there for that long.

There are two parts of me. There's the really critical, film-nerd part of me that loves that, and then there's the part of me where I'm like, "I really didn't like that movie, but I want to work with that director because he loves actors."

I've always loved punk music, since I was in my early teens, since middle school.

You don't share the things you're forced to share [on a movie set].

I'm sure there are directors who don't like to work with actors and don't know how to be sensitive to actors.

I think what inspires me is in a constant state of flux...it's easier to stick to photographers and perhaps cinematographers, though the great medieval, Mannerist, and Baroque painters of Italian, Spanish, Flemish, and German origin are a constant source of inspiration, along with select modernists like Dali.

I need what I'm thinking to come out into the world, even if it's a two-word approval, like, "Yeah, I agree," I need that approval so that in the morning I can get up and use that when I go to work. It's a weird version of focusing.

And also, that's the kind of wonderful thing about film culture, is the interaction between films and who works on what, where they were before, and now what they're doing now, and that inevitably informs how people view a film.

I don't really like watching my work. I don't mind watching it when I was a little kid because I forgive myself a lot, since I was a little kid.

I think any time you're in a new relationship, there's so much to look forward to.

I think its important for movies to recognize that they are part of a history of movies. I also think that most movies are about movies anyway, even if they're about something else.

I'm trying to figure out what I can do creatively. It's about trying to find new things and trying to figure out voices and borrowing from things and learning as much as possible so that I have an archive of things to borrow from.

I think the beauty of images is that they are by definition fetishes and every image (banal or not) as a fetish holds within it the promise of a sensuousness that (without generalizing) at least I, as a human being, am drawn to.

At age 12 I had an obsession with Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and then proceeded to watch all the other Kubrick films I could including a doc called Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures in which it was revealed to me that he started as a photographer...I got a camera sometime shortly after, but spent many years just photographing flowers in my neighborhood.

The music that really moves me is music that's written by people where there isn't a lot of money and they're really singing with just their voice and a guitar about their feelings and about their life. Their poetry is relatively simple, in the sense that it's about their soul in jeopardy.

I've been really interested in focusing on the aspects of my Russian heritage I'm proud of. I'm actually em­barrassed to tell people I'm Russian, because it's become such an awful place.

The way I see the job, my definition of it, is to create characters to the best of your ability and then fit into what's trying to be accomplished in the general framework of the film. I think that's whether you're doing this- even if you're doing musical theater. That's what I think an actors job is. I don't know. I like to think what an actors job is is to create characters.

I've always been drawn to a certain kind of dark aesthetic in cinema and in film, to what's abjected or considered abject. I've been tremendously influenced by noirish cinema whether that's Von Sternberg or Scorsese in the 70s or Lynch, etc.

I usually bring a point and shoot with me so I can go out on the weekends and shoot a bit. I used to bring more cameras, but I'm also an Ebay nut so sometimes I'll order something if I'm really pining for it when I'm on location.

Taking photographs seems to be a means to express some kind of emotional, abstractive narrative. I look at the images that I'm most proud of like a film about the world the way I see it (or at least saw it at that moment, a perspective that seems to be ever-shifting and filled with self-doubt.)

I was drawn to photography as an extension of film, and the beauty of film is that it's a sensuous, fetishistic medium.

I like film because it brings you very close to the absurd reality that you might spend a day shooting and not get a single image that you like or works, and you won't really know for a few days at least as you wait. It connects you and grounds you to a material reality and a patience that seems lost with digital. I also think the grain texture remains forever different, and in my opinion, what I find to be more beautiful.