A Quote by Alan Arkin

Unless you're doing Shakespeare or Chekhov... the written word is not sacrosanct.

Alan Arkin

Quote Topics

Chekhov Doing Shakespeare Unless Word Written Written Word

Quote Author

Alan Arkin
American - Actor
Born: March 26, 1934

Because when you're in drama school, you're playing multiple characters at once. You know, in the morning you're doing a Chekhov play, and then you're doing a Shakespeare workshop midday.

Jonathan Majors

If you're doing a classic play, where if you do a Chekhov, you do the words as written. You can't do that with a novel; you have to do your version of the words as written.

Sam Mendes

I don't think my looks are modern. I always imagined I'd end up doing Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare all my life and never play a contemporary character.

Alex Kingston

Before one is successful that is before any one is ready to pay money for anything you do then you are certain that every word you have written is an important word to have written and that any word you have written is as important as any other word and you keep everything you have written with great care.

Gertrude Stein

I'm sort of nerdy, I liked Shakespeare and Chekhov and the classics.

Martha MacCallum

Ibsen, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Beckett to me are the most revolutionary.

John Cameron Mitchell

All the unimaginative assholes in the world who imagine that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because it was impossible from what we know about Shakespeare of Stratford that such a man would have had the experience to imagine such things - well, this denies the very thing that separates Shakespeare from almost every other writer in the world: an imagination that is untouchable and nonstop.

John Irving

When I first encountered Shakespeare as a boy, I read every word this man has written. To me, he is like an African storyteller.

John Kani

There's no point in it unless it's a story that you really want to tell. It's a nebulous job. Unless you're doing it well, you're not doing anything. And there are a few of those. It's perfectly possible to be a passenger on a film set because if somebody else has written it, you can make nothing of that role and that's exactly what bad directors do.

Colin Firth

When I started in the theater, I'd do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women's roles.

Annette Bening

Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one body of work.

Robert Wilson

If you're sitting around and doing Chekhov and the cat walks in, you must pay attention to the cat. You cannot continue the dialogue of Chekhov without including the cat. So on live television, we'd automatically go into ad-lib gear.

Walter Matthau

It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.

Virginia Woolf

Shakespeare is one of the reasons I've stayed an actor. Sometimes I spend full days doing Shakespeare by myself, just for the joy of reading it, saying those words... I do Shakespeare when I am feeling a certain way.

Al Pacino

The question now becomes about defining your terms. What is literature? Unless we allow it to encompass the oral tradition from which it grew, which means taking it back to Homer and beyond, it demands the written word - poetry and prose. [Bob] Dylan is no slouch at the written word, both in its own right, and transcribed from his lyrics, which have often been acclaimed as poetry and may well stand up as such. But that is not his métier.