Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
School houses do not teach themselves - piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not send out men. It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.
The villain is usually the most interesting part. But it has to be a smart thing. Just dumb cliche villains with a Russian accent and big muscles and a mean face, I don't know. My Russian accent isn't that great, and the muscles aren't that big and the mean face is not enough. You know what I mean? It gets very boring. Tedious stuff.
In the early days of the Russian Revolution in 1917, I was completely in sympathy with it. I felt that it established a new era in the history of the modern world. I was so overwhelmed by it that, if people made any unfriendly comment, I would vigorously defend it. If people condemned the Communist party, I would speak in its defense.
We've turned film into such an industry that we pursue naturalism just by shaking the camera and cutting the film to ribbons to provoke a bogus sense of documentary. But we haven't done the homework. To push the depth that the Actor's Studio did or the Russian theatres did with their actors is to rehearse, to spend time, to dig, to excavate.
My mother was able to get out of Germany because her father was Russian and those with a Russian passport could leave. My father was not so fortunate. He had to be smuggled out of Germany by being tied to the bow of a vegetable freighter that was leaving in the North Sea. He almost lost a leg because it was so cold, but he ended up in France.
I was only in second grade when the Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. The night of his launch - April 12, 1961 - I went out onto the front porch and stared up at the stars, trying to see his capsule passing overhead. Like millions of others, I was enthralled by the idea of space exploration and have been ever since.
