Zoe Kazan Quotes

1. I love to walk around New York. Honestly, that's like the best thing, to walk over to Park Slope and go visit my friend Betty and take her dog out in the park or go walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. I really dig being outside and getting to see everybody in the street.


2. If I'm not working, I don't feel complete.

3. And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like: "Hmm, there's half a page that's good here." Then you throw out everything else.

4. And I think the female creative urge is intrinsically biologically linked to our ability to give birth to a child, even if we've never…I've never given birth, but I feel like it's part of our psychology.

5. But my family's really close and I was interested in what Mommy and Daddy did for a living. So when Mommy and Daddy had a script that wasn't totally age inappropriate, they would let me read it. And we would talk about it.

6. I don't have a lot of patience for boring arthouse movies.





7. I love bad movies, whereas going to the theater for me is a painful experience. I think it's really hard to sit and watch actors do something live and have it not go well.

8. If I ever feel that acting is just soul-sucking and I don't want to do it anymore, I could stop.

9. (on taking up screen-writing) We are in the most insane waiting game of a business, and the only way I have stayed sane is by giving myself another creative outlet.



10. I grew up in L.A., and I don't think I've seen L.A. onscreen in a way that felt real to me. There are definitely movies, but they are few and far between.

11. You set up the story, but the characters start talking, and they go places that you didn't expect. You have to follow.

12. I read a lot of plays as a kid, but I didn't see that many plays, so I feel better-versed in film history and film structure. I just think it's easier to think in pictures.

13. I'm klutzy, and I don't embarrass easily.

14. I think movies have much more magic than the theater. Theater can be a magical experience, but movies thrust their subjectivity on you in a more profound way.

15. My schedule is completely different doing a play than it is doing a movie, and I actually think it's a much harder schedule because you've got to do it eight times a week and you've got to do it good eight times a week and with different kinds of audiences who are cold or drunk or tired, whatever it is.

16. I took a writing class in college, liked it, and my first year out of school I couldn't get a job, so I wrote a play.




17. Nothing's going to come to you by sitting around and waiting for it.

18. I've always really been interested in the Pygmalion myth and both what it has to say about creativity and what it has to say about relationships between men and women.





19. I'm used to very low-budget situations. In "The Exploding Girl," we were literally changing in Starbucks because we didn't have trailers.

20. When I look back, I can say that the summer when I was 19 was a formative time for me. But at the time I just thought I was making tofu every night for dinner and going to work.


21. Sometimes I feel that the people I'm writing are more real to me than the people around me. When you take that imaginative leap, you're living so much in that world.

22. I don't like pretentious films or pretentious people.



23. Writing-wise, I like to have a lot of things on the burners at once, because when I hit a wall, I like to move on to the thing I haven't hit a wall on.

24. I think most actors jump at the chance to do something where the camera's on them all the time.

25. I don't have any hobbies.







26. Well, I have a sister that I'm very close with, and that relationship is probably the most intense relationship of my life to date, probably of my life, period.

27. People really do make the assumption that I had some weirdo Hollywood upbringing, but my parents are incredibly down-to-earth people who worked really hard to raise us in a way that was healthy.

28. I think action should be revealed through character, so if you have a plot problem, it's probably a character problem.


29. I really love people. I love to meet people. I'm curious about people.

30. I find playwriting really painful. I love it, or I wouldn't do it, but I don't love the theater as much as I love movies.

31. I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays.

32. And when I get bored, it's like the worst parts of me come out. I really veer to self-destructive tendencies quickly.






33. I have mad luck. I'm super-good at games like backgammon or anything that requires rolling dice.

34. (why she's reluctant to act) It's just that actors are all lumped together as this vague mass of fame-hungry, swag-wearing, drug-using, eating-disordered people, and I sometimes get sick of being lumped with that group.

35. I think film writing, you're thinking in pictures, and stage writing, you're thinking in dialogue. In film writing, it's also, you only get so many words, so everything has to earn its place in a really economical way. I think for stage writing, you have more leeway.




36. I never wanted to be a playwright.

37. Anytime that I've felt uninspired, I don't force myself to sit down and write. I only do it when I feel the impulse.

38. My hero is Michelle Williams, who I grew close to when we did "Meek's Cutoff." She's an extraordinary actor and mom.





39. I always wrote. My parents are writers. It just seemed like something people did.

40. When I'm writing, I look like a fool because the parts are moving through me and I'm crying and laughing and making faces.

41. I hate going to bed. I read scripts, clean, listen to the radio - I've fallen asleep to "This American Life" more times than I can count!





42. In New York you can just walk out and be among people. You're on the subway among people, you go to cafes, you can talk to people.

43. Broadway is different now than in our parents' generation. The number of straight plays opening there now is so small compared to the 1950s, '60s and '70s. I see many more plays Off Broadway by dint of ticket price and what's being produced. If it costs more, it has to reach a larger audience. That's why there aren't more risky plays on Broadway.



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