Karen Allen Quotes

There's something so wonderful about being an actor in New York.

A lot of times when I've been offered film series and stuff, if they shoot in Los Angeles, I lose interest.

Sometimes I think candor is the only kindness.

I don't know if I've ever played a character who's close to me. There have been some elements of myself in different roles. Sometimes, I show one side of myself and then completely conceal the other.

Scripts are kind of a bare bones type of reading material.

I'm always surprised when people say, "Oh, it got such mixed reviews." I guess I didn't read them.

When I was in my 20s and 30s, there was such a variety and diversity of types of films that you could see. So many of them were really more about the human condition and about relationships between people, and they were smaller films that had a much greater impact on me as a human being.

If you just work on your upper body, you're not going to be a full-range dancer or performer. You've got to work in all directions as much as you possibly can.

In the theater, actors are the essential element of the work. In a film, it's a real collaboration - not that theater isn't, because it is - but it's a collaboration to such an extent that you can give a performance in film that sometimes you look at and you go, "Well, that's not the performance I was trying to give at all."

Idleness does drive me crazy, but I'd rather read or write than do anything just to work. A kind of respect has been instilled in me for acting: I love it too much to ever have a bad relationship with it.

I'm about as healthy as a person can be. I quit smoking seven or eight years ago.

People want to see a movie that casts a mature woman across from a mature man.

As far as acting in films, there is not much out there that is very interesting to do. The ones that are interesting to me are independent films and they have trouble raising money. With people putting their money into blockbusters, there is not much left for the independents.

My son was born somewhat late in my life and I just found myself really feeling like I didn't want to miss out on being a parent and being with him, and not wanting a situation where I was constantly pulled back and forth between being present, and having all these other pressures and considerations.

When independent films break through and actually make it into any level of mainstream-ness or get seen by people or find a life actually in theaters, it's extraordinary. And it doesn't happen that often.

I loved living and breathing theatre so much that I decided I had to find a way to bring my desire to act and my ability to support myself together. I'd run through the possibilities in Washington, so that meant moving to New York.

I don't necessarily like being defined by my profession.

I watch many, many, many independent films every year that you see once in a film festival and they're never heard of ever again. Many of them are very, very good.

I'm from a generation of fantastic actresses. It's a big pool of really wonderful actresses, and so many of them we never even get to see on the screen anymore.

Let's just say I decided that while my son is young I don't want to do projects that would take me away for months.

You want to move into worlds you've never been in before. It would be like going to the same restaurant all the time or going to the same place for vacation all the time. Where is the adventure in that?

You know, I don't really understand a suburban environment. I want to be out in the woods, I want to be where it's wild, I want to wake up and hear birds, I want to walk outside and see a gaggle of turkeys bouncing across my lawn - I want to be someplace like that - or I want to be right in the middle of an urban environment.

I was quite eager to work, anytime somebody was offering me a job, if I liked the role. Because I was always very discriminating from the very beginning, in the sense that I had absolutely no problem saying no to jobs when they came along if somehow they didn't fit into my universe - whatever that was.

I thought, I need to reinvent myself. I want every day of life to be wonderful, fascinating, interesting, creative. And what am I gonna do to make that happen?

Unfortunately, I feel as actors we have to fight for the right to really go in as many directions as possible.

I was always drawn toward the Actor's Studio. I studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute when I first came to New York. One of my favorite teachers was one of Al [Pachino]'s teachers, a guy named Charlie Laughton, who was just a wonderful, wonderful man.

CGI is to me like watching a cartoon. It can be effective, if it's done well. A lot of times you don't feel any real risk. You're watching a bunch of computer-generated graphics.

I've had so many people just come up to me and say, 'When you came up on the screen, everybody in the theater applauded.' It's just so sweet, really.

I think it's very important that films like Bad Hurt don't get lost in the mix of the sci-fi-kill-everything-on-the-screen-blood-dripping-down-the-walls sort of the world of the cinema that we live in.

The secrecy thing has gotten to be more and more prevalent in films, and maybe that's good. It's nice to go see a film and not know anything about it. Sometimes I feel like we know too much about films.

I've never done anything for money. My first love is things of limited commercial appeal. I could be happy doing Shakespeare for the rest of my life.

As actors, the magic is in the almost spiritual experience to really enter another world, to really enter a belief of being in another person's shoes and to really take on their experiences as someone else has written them and imagined them. It's kind of a sacred thing. It's a very spiritual experience. That in itself for me is the main thing that keeps me coming back to it. I like to travel, but for me, this is the greatest travel.

Eventually you love people - friends or lovers - because of their flaws.

I try to offer as much as I can to the director so he has as much to work with as possible to create the character that, really, he wants to create in a sense.

There is a difference when you work with actors who have worked on the stage. When we're out there in front of an audience eight times a week, you can't do it on your own.

For me, the motivation really was to work with Al Pacino. To me, that seemed like an incredible opportunity, just a learning opportunity because I thought so highly of him.

I feel as though I would be delighted to come back into working in the film world, and working in the theater world again. I'm just gonna see what happens.

I just felt like I had to create a life for myself where I was more independent.

I said to myself, 'I've waited a long time in my life to have a child, and I'm missing it, I want to continue to have a career, but not this way.

I was so lucky. I was very broke and I was taking classes at Lee Strasberg's Institute and I saw a 3 X 5 index card on the bulletin board advertising for college-aged girls for a film. That was Animal House.

I have to say from an actor's perspective, to work with a director who has been an actor through most of their career is a pleasure. They generally have a very deep understanding of the process of what you're doing, of how you are building and exploring the character.

When I read a film script, I kind of see it in my head and I see the moments that shape what I understand the character to be. There's very little time for rehearsal.

I've always done things the hard way. I was born like a piece of tangled yarn. The job is trying to untangle it, and I'll probably go on doing it for the rest of my life.

If there are no other wonderful roles that come my way, I have a quite an interesting, dynamic life.

I think that there is a real beauty to the live aspect of the theater, and the working with a director for a month on a script in the isolation of a room and really deeply delving into who are these people, what is the story we're telling, how do we want to tell it?