Alan Arkin

Actor

1934-03-26 – 2023-06-29

Alan Arkin was an American actor, director, and writer whose career included film, television, and stage work. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Little Miss Sunshine. He was widely respected for dramatic and comic performances across multiple generations.

Books by Alan Arkin

Galaxy

thirty years of innovative science fiction
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The lemming condition
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Tony's hard work day
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Quotes by Alan Arkin

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.
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I love working if it's with people who are capable of having a good time. People with a little bit of enjoyment of what they do. If it's enormous pressure, and people feel that their lives are at stake, then it's agony. So I try to pick projects where I feel like I'm going to avoid those traps.
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You have to think of your career the way you look at the ocean, deciding which wave you're gonna take and which waves you're not gonna take. Some of the waves are going to be big, some are gonna be small, sometimes the sea is going to be calm. Your career is not going to be one steady march upward to glory.
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Something I miss terribly from the '60s - the most important phrase in the English language was, 'I got hung up.' Somebody says they got hung up, it's unassailable, you know? You don't go near that. Whoa! I know what that can be like.
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'Catch-22' was a huge failure, and it rubbed off on everybody connected to it. I had a bunch of lean years where I had to do things, a lot of which I wasn't wildly enthusiastic about.
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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.
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Unless you're doing Shakespeare or Chekhov... the written word is not sacrosanct.
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