4 Quotes

Here are four quotes from the January issue of Esquire. They (like many quotes on this blog) don't necessarily reflect my opinions, they merely speak in some way about my interests.

Penn Jillette: When someone comes up after a show and says, "I'll tell you honestly what I think about what you're doing," I go, "No, you already have. I wanted you to be one one thousandth of this audience tonight and that's exactly what you were." You don't get to stuff the ballot box because you're willing to come up to me afterward. I don't want any opinion about our show from anyone I'm not paying. If you're a friend of mine and I go to see your play, I'm not thinking of how you put it together. I'm thinking, Oh, my friend's onstage. If the play gets boring, maybe I'll hold hands with my wife, maybe I'll look at some girl's ass up ahead. And then you come back and say, "What about the middle section? Was it boring?" I wasn't bored. I had other stuff to do. "How can the middle section be fixed?" That's not my problem. I don't know what you're trying to do. But if you hire me, I will sit there and think about nothing except how you can do it better.

Alan Arkin: I don't know if acting was a calling for me. I feel like it came out of a lot of emotional needs - the same old actor bullshit: I need attention. I need love. Blah, blah, blah. And the truth is, being an actor doesn't help with that at all. The approval's not really the kind of approval you need, anyway. What someone like that needs is one-on-one, personal caring. The anonymity of show-business caring doesn't help. Like my manager tells me all the time: "They love you." Finally I said, " I don't want to hear that word anymore. They don't love me. Maybe they like my work a little bit. But they don't love me. They don't even know me. If they never saw me again, it wouldn't make any difference. If we were both drowning, they would shove me under to get on the raft."

Peter O'Toole: When we were drama students, we imitated John Gielgud, we imitated Richard Burton. we imitated Michael Redgrave, we imitated Larry Olivier. It's language. For my generation, drama, the theater, plays, they are human speech as an art form. To turn up for material that exists and say "No, I'm superior to that material" is a very strange attitude. I'd be very careful if I were you.

O'Toole cont'd: If you go to the West End theaters now, it's a graveyard. Lots of musicals, they're cheerful. But the plays? God almighty.