A Quote by Alan Arkin

There have been times when I've been broke, and a job came along, and I've said, 'Yeah! Let's do it!' But I will never do something without having a feeling of knowing how to play it. I've been in projects that I felt terrible about afterwards, but I've always had something that sparked me while I was doing it.
I've never been lonely. I've been in a room... I've felt suicidal, I've been depressed. I've felt awful ... awful beyond all , but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude.
I was about 17 or 18 when I first started performing in public. I had a teacher when I was a freshman in college and she came up to me afterwards and said she had been crying while I had been singing, and it really shocked me.
I never made conscious choices. There were times in my life that I chose the first job that came along because I was broke. I think that there were maybe a handful of times that I had a choice. In recent years, Ive had more of a choice, and its been very nice to have that choice, but most of the time, you just hope that theres another job after this one.
Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority. It wasn't like somebody told me about it and I said, "I don't know how to spell that." I said, "Yeah, I've got that on my list, so I'm okay." But there came a point when we realized it was happening faster and was a much deeper phenomenon than had been recognized in our strategy.
I think the face of the franchise is kind of how you take it. I know that's been said about me, and that's been said about me at Penn State. But, I think it's kind of how you view it. I really never viewed myself as that. If that comes along with the things that I'm doing, then so be it.
I had in effect been thrown out of graduate school because I was a lousy graduate student, and I had to find a job, and I took the first job that came along. It happened to be a management trainee job in a life insurance company, and I just stayed. It was always, mainly, the idea was that I would support myself as a writer, and I knew I would have to have some sort of work, and it didn't make a whole lot of difference to me what it was. I mean, I could have been a paper hanger or something for that matter.
I think it’s important to have a good hard failure when you're young. I learned a lot out of that. Because it makes you kind of aware of what can happen to you. Because of it I’ve never had any fear in my whole life when we’ve been near collapse and all of that. I’ve never been afraid. I’ve never had the feeling I couldn’t walk out and get a job doing something.
She asked me why I always had something flip to say. I said that I didn't know, but having been blessed with the gift, I felt obliged to use it.
Luckily, I'm setting records without even thinking about it, without having the pressure of having to do as well as the person who came before me. It's more like, "Yeah, I'm doing my thing and what happens, happens," and fortunately those have been some pretty amazing results.
It's always been very important for me to be surrounded by people. It's never been enough for me to be successful alone. I want to be around people my own age who are also doing things I can learn from. And something Francis Ford Coppola said when we were doing the movie was, "If you learn something about people when you do dinner with them every week, you'll learn a lot more if you play softball with them every week." This is us learning what the climate is creatively among us.
I love my mother for all the times she said absolutely nothing.... Thinking back on it all, it must have been the most difficult part of mothering she ever had to do: knowing the outcome, yet feeling she had no right to keep me from charting my own path. I thank her for all her virtues, but mostly for never once having said, "I told you so.
I've only three times in my career felt I absolutely had to play a part and the first two I got close and was vetoed - by the same person actually. So when 'Strike' came along I had no qualms about signing on for something I was potentially still going to be doing in 10 years.
Sometimes we take somebody who's been in the trenches and fought the good fight and been steady for granted. Sometimes we act as if never having done something and not knowing what you're doing is a virtue.
I've always been terrified about not having money. I've been a big saver and a big earner. When I've been out of work, I've always found another job. I never wanted to get into debt, because money was very tight when I was growing up. I never felt deprived, but I couldn't have the things I wanted.
For a while now I've had this feeling that there's something that I'm supposed to be doing or something that I'm supposed to contribute. I don't know what that is yet, but it's been plaguing me - like I've missed my calling somehow.
There's something about approaching 50 that's very liberating. Political struggle has always been a 24-hour-a-day job for me. I felt I could never take time out for myself. Now I feel I owe it to myself to develop in ways I've been putting off all my life.
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