Alan Arkin Quotes

You know that day after day of, Oh God what am I going to do with myself feeling? The fear of the emptiness that it implies keeps me going.

I'd rather fight a buzzsaw than dance.

My nightmare is that I don't want to be OK.

There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.

Fear is a huge thing for older people.

I think in the case of horror, it's a chance to confront a lot of your worse fears and those fears usually have to do, ironically, with powerlessness and isolation.

The regrets of yesterday and the fear of tomorrow can kill you.

I just think that for a lot of people - not to take the focus off of myself - that feeling of imminent dread, like a cloak of black dust, was always around me.

Fear is that thing that keeps you up there on that other plateau. Fear is that thing that just keeps you closed down, and quite frankly, alone.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

The most terrifying thing I can think of is being alone - and I mean utterly alone, like no one else in the world alone - at night. That's the nucleus of the first story in my collection and it's also where the title came from for the book.

There is no such thing as pure pleasure; some anxiety always goes with it.

My dark secrets are life threatening. Pockets of unhappiness set in aspic that build and build. I have this primitive feeling that if something good happens, it is going to be followed by something bad. There is always a price to pay.

Nothing is more capable of troubling our reason, and consuming our health, than secret notions of jealousy in solitude.

Worry - a God, invisible but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse; it takes away the appetite, and turns the hair gray.

I was such a sullen, angry, sad kid. I'm sure there are writers who have had happy childhoods, but what are you going to write about? No ghosts, no fear. I'm very happy that I had an unhappy and uncomfortable childhood.

But I fear, my lot being cast in Scotland, that beauty would not be content.

I feel not unlike a small boy, waking from a bad dream to find reality not much of an improvement.

The Truth, when you finally chase it down, is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears.

I'm a sponge. I sometimes don't want to go out of my house because it's like, 'Who's going to make me cry today?'

Even the sheep are afraid of me.

I've had a lifelong waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop feeling when something good happens.

Good horror is about so much more than slashing: it's a way of examining grief and loss of self.

I have dreams where everything will disappear or go away, so I'm always working harder each year.

The thought of being alone when time goes on is a little bit scary sometimes, but not really.