Alan Arkin

I want to feel like I'm doing something creative and trying different things, putting different hats on and playing. I don't know what's the point otherwise; otherwise, it's just a job. You punch a time clock.

Over the years, I played with a couple of spectacular guitar players, and playing with them has made me play better than I knew how to play. I hope the same thing is true with acting.

Education does not mean jamming information into somebody's head. Rather, it's that ancient idea that all knowledge is within us; to teach is to help somebody pull it out of themselves.

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.

You hit a certain age, and you haven't died yet, and you become an elder statesman. I think I get a lot of applause because I'm not keeling over.

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.

That's the privilege of old age: You don't have to remember.

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 was a stoopball fan. I played stoopball all the time.

I'm very old. I haven't got time to be charming.

It's - everybody's looking at the bottom line all the time, and failure doesn't look good on the bottom line, and yet you don't learn anything without failing.

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.