Remembering Alan Arkin: 25 of His Most Interesting and Inspiring Quotes
Beloved stage, television and film actor Alan Arkin has died at 89. Arkin was well-known for decades and handsomely rewarded for his years in Hollywood and on Broadway with both Oscars and Tony Awards.
His death was confirmed by his sons, Adam, Matthew and Anthony, in an official statement to People. "Our father was a uniquely talented force of nature, both as an artist and a man," they said. "A loving husband, father, grand and great grandfather, he was adored and will be deeply missed."
The actor had most recently starred in Netflix's The Kominsky Method with Michael Douglas, playing a role that earned him Emmy nominations in both 2019 and 2020. He also won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his memorable turn as Edwin Hoover in 2006's Little Miss Sunshine and earned his fourth Academy Award nomination for 2021's Argo.
In addition to working as an actor, Arkin led improv workshops through his troupe at Second City. In an interview with The Slender Thread, he shared that the workshops were having a profound impact on both himself and the participants.
"Something happens in the workshops that is transforming for people," he said. "It’s what I had hoped for, but it’s happening in a broader way than I ever envisioned. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I realized why I don’t want to teach acting and why doing the improvisational workshops is so exciting."
He continued, "If I taught acting for fifty years, I’d be lucky if out of the hundreds of people I worked with, two or three people would learn how to fly, to get out of their own way. But at the end of a two-day improvisational workshop, we have, out of a group of twenty, eighteen or nineteen people that are soaring and it’s miraculous."
Clearly, the man had a big heart and a way with words. Below, 25 quotes from Alan Arkin that demonstrate exactly who he was, and what made him such a compelling actor and human being.
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25 Alan Arkin quotes
1. "Either you're growing or you're decaying; there's no middle ground. If you're standing still, you're decaying."
2. "It's murder to doubt yourself in life. It took until I was 45 to get to that point. As hard as it is in your work, it's harder in your life. But it can be done."
3. "I had this sense that I didn’t exist. My parents were wonderful people in many ways, but they weren’t affectionate. I don’t remember ever being touched by either one. I felt ignored to the point where I didn’t even exist—so acting was my lifeline to not feeling like I was being obliterated. For many years, the only place I felt alive was on stage."
4. "I’m like a horse going down the trail. Acting is so ingrained in my physiognomy and the channels of my brain that I find myself missing aspects of the business. But I don’t need it anymore. I should probably get over it."
5. "Beethoven used to be a heroin injection for me. Jazz, the same. The great novels, the same. I could not conceive of going through a day without reading great literature or listening to great music. Now it’s mostly an assault. Living in silence. Looking at the garden. Having a relationship with trees and flowers and the sky. That’s what’s profound to me now."
6. "See, people talk about Hollywood as if it's a—an entity unto itself. What goes on in Hollywood is a microcosm of what's going on in the whole rest of the country. So, it is not an industry unto itself. It's following what all the other industries in the country are doing. The same thing."
7. "My main aspiration is to get a really good remote control that can control all the devices in my house simultaneously."
8. "When we leave ourselves alone, when we’re flowing like we’re supposed to flow, we automatically go into a creative mode."
9. "I have an almost infallible guide that tells me when somebody’s being truthful or whether they are showing off—and that’s my rear end. If I find myself sitting forward in my seat, something is really happening, and it’s interesting because it’s out of ego-control. If it’s smart-ass stuff, then I find myself sitting back on the chair and saying, 'Ooohh he’s clever, but he’s not engaging in the event.' It’s a gauge that I have, that I feel I’m good at because I pay attention to it."
10. "'Passionate' is related to the idea of torment and suffering, and a genuinely feeling person is somebody who has their feelings accessible to them, which you don’t have when you’re in a state of passion. You may have one single feeling accessible to you, but the panorama of them will not be accessible."
11. "I think that the need an artist has to manipulate the world indicates some kind of aberration. What do you need to manipulate it for, it’s fine the way it is. The work will do itself, the thing will do itself. There’s a level of trust here."
12. "You need to remember, you need to shed skin after skin after skin until the truth, which is within you already, just starts revealing itself to you."
13. "The last time I heard real screaming in the theatre was when I went to see a movie I did years ago, called Wait Until Dark. Now, my mother was the least emotional person on the planet, but when I got killed in the movie, she stood up and screamed, 'That's my son!' At Radio City Music Hall in New York!"
14. "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."
15. "Meditation is misrepresented a lot. The most important aspects are the things that are invisible. The ways that your emotional system changes. There are things going on inside me now that if I start telling people about it they think I’m crazy."
16. "I have to have a real life, with real people, in order to inform what I’m doing, otherwise it just becomes the snake eating its own tail. Vampirism."
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17. "I am not as abrasive as I used to be."
Photo by John Pineda/Getty Images
18. "I don't believe there's anything in life you can't go back and fix. The ancient Vedas—the oldest Hindu philosophy—and modern science agree that time is an illusion. If that's true, there's no such thing as a past or a future—it's all one huge now. So what you fix now affects the past and the future."
19. "Marriage requires searing honesty at all costs. I learned that from my third wife."
20. "For many years my acting came from a place of surmounting some enormous obstacle, confronting some stern and faceless judge who would condemn me to a pit of hell if I didn't achieve the 'zone,' if even for a moment. Not a particularly happy place to work from."
21. "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.'"
22. "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."
23. "I had to jump around in the arts for a while just to survive. I earned a little money here and there, playing the guitar at union meetings, functions. I sold some science-fiction stories. I knew there was absolutely no question of me not being connected with the arts, but I couldn't find any acting jobs."
24. "I'm an actor. My life as an actor depends on who sends me what. I'm just taking the best stuff that I can find that's sent my way, regardless of how big or little the paycheck is. I don't want to work for scale anymore. I'm at a point now where, no matter how good something is, I'm not going to kill myself and end up in the hole."
25. "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."
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