Sydney Pollack Quotes

As a son of a man who pretended to be one thing for 33 years of my life and then was another thing, the questions of 'what is real' and 'what is not real' are very blurrily vivid to me.

There are many movies which come with an attitude of black and white. I am good and you are bad. And there are many movies that are also trying to see the reality as it is or to discover what really is behind the character or events.

Good can exist in bad, and bad can exist in good. It's not black and white.

It's really rare in life that a situation is as black and white as we tend to paint it.

You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?

The truth isn't all things to all people all of the time.

My first book was about grappling with my identity and transitioning medically and socially as a young person. At that point, it hadn't been told yet. There wasn't a trans memoir that was written from the perspective of a young person that transitioned.

The Divorce, it's just like any performance that's given where I really just completely lost myself in that life.

To a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself.

Everything is true and not true about everything. That’s one thing I’ve learned.

There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.

It's well known there's always two sides, if no more.

Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.

I did not think I had what it took to be an actor, because most of the actors that I encountered were people who were very narcissistic and I thought since I lacked narcissism to become an actor because that's what it took. It was more of a social experiment for me to walk in the shoes of other people that I found interesting.

Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.

I'm the seagull. No, that's not it. I'm an actress. That's it.

I think the fun thing about this franchise [Planet of Apes], as storytellers, is that a lot of the franchises are very black and white. This is all about the gray areas; it's really about the nature.

Some people that are heroes to some can be looked at by another group of people as villains. As far as a middle point, just speaking for myself, that's exactly what to avoid.

I'm trying to find myself as a person, sometimes that's not easy to do. Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do. The best way for me to find myself as a person is to prove to myself that I am an actress.

With everything that you do, once the costume is on, and you're in the pretend hospital, and you're there with your co-workers, it all sort of snaps into place: Who you are, what it feels like, who these people are to you.

Villains are mostly just people villainized by circumstance

We must not always try to plumb the depths of the human heart; the truths it contains are among those that are best seen in half-light or in perspective.

I wouldn't like to live in a world where everything's as cut-and-dried as most people think it is

At a certain age you start becoming brave enough to reveal yourself and it's the revealing of who you are that enables you to dig deeper into different characters. You'll get to a point where you can say: 'I can relate to that', 'I know that', 'I don't have to make that up' and that resonates with people in the audience who can tell that you've been there.

Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.