Elia Kazan Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

I was the hero of the young insurgent working class art movement.

Elia Kazan
For years after I resigned, I was still faithful to their way of thinking. But not in the American Communists.

Elia Kazan
There was no doubt that there was a vast organization which was making fools of all the liberals in Hollywood and taking their money, that there was a police state among the Left element in Hollywood and Broadway.

Elia Kazan
The motion pictures I have made and the plays I have chosen to direct represent my convictions.

Elia Kazan
Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.

Elia Kazan
The belief that the good in American society will finally win out... I don't believe any more.

Elia Kazan
Look for the contradictions in every character, especially in your heroes and villains. No one should be what they first seem to be. Surprise the audience.

Elia Kazan
Very often the Group actor is a critic when he's acting and an actor when he's criticizing.

Elia Kazan
I was not a collective person or a bohemian; I was an elitist.

Elia Kazan
The Group was the best thing professionally that ever happened to me. I met two wonderful men. Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman, both of whom were around thirty years old. They were magnetic, fearless leaders. During the summer I was an apprentice, they were entertaining in a Jewish summer camp... At the end of the summer they said to me: You may have talent for something, but it's certainly not acting.

Elia Kazan
It's difficult, if not impossible, to get away with anything false before the camera. That instrument penetrates the husk of the actor; it reveals what's truly happening - if anything, if nothing. A close-up demands absolute truth. It's a severe and awesome truth

Elia Kazan
The real challenge is not simply to survive. Hell, anyone can do that. It's to survive as yourself, undiminished.

Elia Kazan
He carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish home.... He was the force that held the thirty-odd members of the theatre together, and made them permanent.

Elia Kazan
I used to spend most of my time straining to be a nice guy so people would like me.

Elia Kazan
Anybody who informs on other people is doing something disturbing and even disgusting.

Elia Kazan
What's called a difficult decision is a difficult decision because either way you go there are penalties.

Elia Kazan
I would rather do what I did than crawl in front of a ritualistic Left and lie the way those other comrades did betray my own soul.

Elia Kazan
I knew the exuberance of playing before an admiring audience and hearing my secret voice.

Elia Kazan