Brit Marling Quotes

I always feel like the editing room is like coming into the kitchen. What kind of a meal do you make from there? It can be anything.

I feel like success to me is about feeling like I have done something in storytelling, where I've gotten close to articulating something intangible that I'm feeling, and I think I get closer every time, but I don't know that I've done that yet.

I think we're always looking for an excuse to connect.

When you come out to L.A. to make movies or to do this kind of work, everybody is coming out on their own and you leave your tribe behind. Then, it's a question of, that was your tribe by blood, and now, what is the tribe that you're making by choice or by what you think is important? I think we were having that experience, so somehow the cult world seemed really compelling.

I think movies do change people's hearts.

I think what's so attractive about acting is that you get to live several lifetimes in one.

That's the funny thing about cinema, it is an intellectual medium, but it's also sort of anti-intellectual.

Modern life has gotten so strange, we all get 150 emails and text messages a day, and it's hard when things are moving that quickly to keep that sense of wonder about being alive.

Nothing seemed as scary as waking up at 40 and realizing that I had not lived a very courageous life.

It seems to be this hot-bed for these ideas and bringing these groups together. You find that the one thing that everybody has in common, whether they're a teenager who has run away from his parents, or a divorcee who lost her husband, is that they all have in common this feeling of searching for a meaning in their lives.

If you came from the future and you arrived here, what would you be like? Would your immune system be depressed from that travel? Would you be well? Would you be ill? Would you be affected by micro-organisms of the time period and be hiding out in a basement? How would it all work, practically?

I couldn't be a novelist for instance. It feels like a very lonely endeavor. I don't know that I could survive the solitude of that.

I'd studied theater growing up and loved that, but didn't have many examples of artists around me.

I think the first thing I thought when I got out to L.A. was just: Oh, if I want to act, I have to find a different way to go about it because the parts for girls are as dispiriting as the banking jobs. You have to really be willing to invent, I guess, a different path for yourself.

So at some point you realize that your life is not just going to start one day in the future, that you're living it.

I feel like developing the muscle of my imagination became a way to survive reality.

One of my favorite stories growing up was 'A Wrinkle in Time'. I loved that book.

Being a waitress can be a very brutal job sometimes, and I remember during the training, the person said to me, "The redder the lips, the better the tips," and that was like the only advice she gave me.

I think one thing for sure that you learn the more films that you make is how important it is to choose your collaborators.

For some reason, I have a very strange conception of time. I am constantly hovering at some overview, more macro.

The problem is if you play enough of parts in films that are sort of more financial products than anything or films in which the girl is a thankless, thoughtless, underwritten character along the way, you're no longer the person who had something fresh or vital to offer. I think it really does start to diminish some part of you, to put yourself through things you don't really want to be doing.

Eventually, if you're the train that's leaving the station, people will race to catch up with you. I think that's one of the things I've figured out. You can't wait for permission to act, you just do; then people are like, "Oh, look at that person just doing over there. Maybe I'll come join them."

I'd love to do anything that is outside of my comfort zone, that I've never done before. Whenever I think about something that I want to take on, I like it if it makes me a bit nervous, or makes me feel like I don't know exactly that I can pull it off.

There are so many filmmakers who are so talented, and actors and writers who work so hard, and it's really hard to let your work enter the world.

One of the things that's awesome about being an actor is that you get to do stories, live lives and have experiences that you never could have even conceived of, and that's because you're living in another writer's imagination and another director's imagination.

I never want to repeat the same thing. I always want it to be different from what I've done, and to be not quite sure whether or not I can pull it off, until I hopefully do.

Living in Cuba made me unafraid of whatever could happen to me.

Life and death and birth is this fantastic mystery that we cannot fully grasp.

I believe in what science fiction can do, which is it can set up simple rules that it has to follow to try to illuminate something about the present that is somewhat invisible to us.

One of my favorite stories growing up was A Wrinkle in Time. I loved that book. I still remember the image, so strongly, of all the kids coming out of their house at the same time, they're all bouncing a ball at the same time, and they all go back in at the same time. A Wrinkle in Time moved me deeply.

We put limitations on the way that we think about things, on ourselves, think about all the boxes we live in, male or female, you're this age, that age, this is your job, this is not your job, everything is about getting boxed in. I think we accept a lot of those boxes, that labeling, and the way that we perceive the world, but what even is perception? It all seems pretty flexible to me.

But, it has something to do with having belief in a human future and what that human future is. What is the future of humanity? How does this whole experiment not self-destruct with the environment and everything else going on?

Human beings are flawed and complicated and messy.

Because we're watching so many movies and are consumed by so many stories, science fiction lets you do something a bit fresh and that hasn't been seen before.

I think you get to see, through the different cult members, why people are attracted to a group like this. Everyone is there for a different reason and from a different background. That was part of what was interesting for us, in researching cults and exploring it. A lot of this happens in California.

I feel like, when the audience connects with something, they enjoy the experience so much that they want other people to go have it. They're like, "Don't talk about it. Don't tell. Just go!" It's a nice feeling to have people coming around it that way, protecting the ideas in it, so that everyone can see it for themselves.

I used to be able to sit in a chair and for four hours straight in a very focused meditative way be in my own world without ay interruption. And now it's like your brain is getting so trained to check your phone, and there is like a dopamine release every time you get a text whether it's a good or a bad one. I'm really worried about what it's doing to our minds.

A whole film is just about arriving at a moment where you hopefully transfer some feeling to the audience.

So much of the world is being brought up on these stories that Hollywood is coming up with and exporting all over. They have so much power and influence, so it's really important that they represent women properly.

I feel like I'm a much better person when I'm developing my imagination and my innocence and my vulnerability. I like that version of me better than the version where I'm just working on my analytical mind.

When you're reading Chekov, you're in this world that he's created. I never would have created that world. I don't know anything about that time period or that setting or those groups of people or what those experiences were, but oh my gosh, it's amazing to daydream on it and put yourself there.

Early rejections are really tough, especially when all of your friends who you went to school with now have legitimate jobs, are getting married, having children, buying real estate, being adults. And you're still trying to figure out how to make a living doing the thing you think you love, but you're not even sure yet because you haven't even done it. It was a long road of risk and treachery.

Any man worth his salt loves a feminist. Only men who are afraid of the feminine in themselves are afraid of women.

I'm still a bit of a romantic and an idealist and hopelessly naive.

Is there anything worse than being called the 'It Girl?' By definition, there will be a new one in two weeks.

I think we're in this exciting moment of Internet streaming storytelling, and it's anybody's guess what that is or what it means. It can take on any form. That's what's so exciting about the time we're in; these filmmakers are coming in and letting the story tell itself as it wants to be told.

People go to the cinema to be moved; they wanna laugh, they wanna cry, they wanna feel something deeply, especially if they're not feeling deeply in their own lives.

I think we're scared of intimacy - all of us, a little bit.