Ellen Burstyn Quotes

1. I've lived most of my life in Manhattan, but as close as Brooklyn is to Manhattan, there are people who live there who have been to Manhattan maybe once or twice.


2. It's been awhile. My Oscar is getting kind of tarnished. I looked at it a couple of years ago and thought I really needed a new one.

3. I've wanted an Oscar since I was seven years old. It is the basis of all my secret fantasies.





4. I wanted to work on this central problem of killing. How you go about killing. Now, in the film I had to kill my children - well, I didn't want to get that far.

5. What a lovely surprise to finally discover how unlonely being alone can be.

6. The interesting thing about doing a play is to find a way to make it fresh and do it as though you were doing it for the first time.



7. She loses 50 pounds in the film, and goes from fairly sane to totally out of her mind. So for the first part of the film I was wearing a 40 pound fat suit, which is very, very uncomfortable. But the worst part was the neck.

8. (Interview with Associated Press Radio, 2004, regarding her Emmy nomination for her performance in "Mrs. Harris", in which she appeared for 14 seconds.) I thought it was fabulous. My next ambition is to get nominated for seven seconds, and, ultimately, I want to be nominated for a picture in which I don't even appear. 

9. She goes from one addiction to another. All are ways for her to not feel her feelings.




10. Their life is about getting enough money to put food on the table to feed their children, and that's it.

11. So I was at the Actor's Studio, thinking about this, and I happened to glance over to the other side of the stage and I saw the ugliest chair I have ever seen. And I thought: "Well, I could kill that chair!"

12. But I was always uncomfortable in that. Physically uncomfortable. Either from the fat suit, or the neck, or my severe dieting. Or wearing the camera.



13. It's about avoiding reality through various escape routes that become addictions and lead to Hell. My character is addicted to television, chocolate, coffee, to her dream of her son, which has no basis in reality.

14. They pulled "Resurrection" out of the theatres, so it was running in New York and I was nominated for the Oscar and there was no ad in the newspapers to say it was running. So it was literally killed.

15. Acting feels like a congenial condition to me - it's in my genes.

16. To me, it's a very moral film. If my son were a teenager now, I would drag him to see it.

17. I did my famous cabbage soup diet, so I was able to do it.






18. Well my taste wasn't very good when I first started out. But later, when I began to appreciate the art of acting, I would say the actress I most admire is Vanessa Redgrave.

19. I always wanted to play Joan of Arc. I've always wanted to do that. Now I'm thinking: "Maybe there's a story in Joan of Arc's mother!" If I don't hurry up, her grandmother!

20. Then in came this script with another very low offer, and another drug addict and a depressing and difficult part to play. I thought: "Why should I put myself through that for hardly any money?"






21. That's when I understood deeply that with all my studies of other religions, basically I really am devoted to Jesus. I am not a church-going Christian, not a conventional one by most standards, but in my heart, Jesus is my guru.

22. It's unfortunate but our society is such that, for women in Hollywood, you get to a certain age and just fall off a cliff. But in my case, I refuse to die. I will hang on, by a little finger if necessary.



23. I couldn't kill a chicken, I couldn't kill a cow - I was a vegetarian too at that time - so I thought, well what is there that I could kill? I couldn't kill this and I couldn't kill that.

24. It's a sin to have your films not to make money.






25. I regret turning down the lead role in "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore"…Who is this Martin Scorsese person? Why should I see his little film about "Mean Streets"?

26. I do like to work with young directors because it's such a difficult business that I think after directors have been around a while sometimes, not always, but sometimes their passion gets siphoned off because they get hurt.

27. I talked to women who lived there, to get their speech patterns and outlook on life - and how narrow that is.






28. When you've been an actress for 45 years as I have, it's a feast or famine life and I thought that maybe it was time now to have a steady gig!

29. I sketched out a rough story for them and the director said, well it's a good story but we have the go-ahead from Universal to make this script and did I want to do it. I said no, and they left.

30. It was about this school teacher who went to Jerusalem and started bleeding from the palms. It just didn't make an awful lot of sense to me.



31. Nobody would want to leave that film to go get high.

32. I think that the change began…I made a film a few years ago called "The Spitfire Grill", and that didn't make much money either, but it was a good film and an independent film.


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