Uta-san Quotes & Sayings

I love going to the movies; I love watching good movie actors. They must know something I don't. — Uta Hagen

If you want a bourgeois existence, you shouldn't be an actor. You're in the wrong profession. — Uta Hagen

Awards don't really mean much. — Uta Hagen

I have never been interested in making a photograph that describes what the world I live in looks like, but I am interested in what pictures (of the world) look like. — Uta Barth

Since the time of the ancient Greeks a democracy has depended on its philosophers and creative artists. It can only flourish by continuous probing, prodding, and questioning of the social conditions under which man exists and tries to better himself. One of the first moves of a dictatorship is to stifle the artists and thinkers who have the ability to stir up dissent from any prescribed dogma which might enslave them. Because the artist can arouse the curiosity and conscience of his community, he becomes a threat to those who have taken power. — Uta Hagen

To rebel or revolt against the status quo is in the very nature of an artist. — Uta Hagen

Uta Hagen is our greatest living actor; she is, moreover, interested and mystified by the presence of talent and its workings; her third gift is a passion to communicate the mysteries of the craft to which she has given her life. There are almost no American actors uninfluenced by her. — Fritz Weaver

Morning, Peter," she calls
from the back, in her exaggerated German accent. Mawning, Pedder.
She's been in the States more than fifteen years now, but her
accent has gotten heavier. Uta is a member of what seems to be a
growing body of defiantly unassimilated expatriates. She on one
hand disdains her country of origin (Darling, the word "lugubrious"
comes to mind) but on the other seems to grow more German (more
not-American) with every passing year.
...
Because Uta is German, utterly German, which of course is probably why she left
there, and insists that she'll never go back. — Michael Cunningham

Confronted by a Church that has ceased to manifest God's mercy and intimate connection with humankind - that has converted Christ into a grim and joyless adjunct to the policing of bedrooms and marital intercourse - men and women can no longer see themselves as beloved of God, only as impure and reprehensible. — Uta Ranke-Heinemann

I love playing Chekhov. That's the hardest; that's why I love it most. — Uta Hagen

According to Jerome, Mary laid the foundations of virginity for both sexes, and the moral superiority of virginity becomes clear in her person. The reality was the other way around: Virginity was not prized because Mary was always a virgin, rather Mary was made a perpetual virgin because virginity was so highly praised. — Uta Ranke-Heinemann

All tedious research is worth one inspired moment. — Uta Hagen

No work of art is ever finished, nothing is ever static, no performance is for keeps. — Uta Hagen

I have disassociated myself from that book. — Uta Hagen

Usually, someone who's in a show gets me a ticket. I feel cornered. I can't walk out if I don't like it. — Uta Hagen

I think, by and large, the level of acting is mediocre. When I go to the theatre, I get so angry. I don't go. — Uta Hagen

Theoretically, the actor ought to be more sound in mind and body than other people, since he learns to understand the psychological problems of human beings when putting his own passions, his loves, fears, and rages to work in the service of the characters he plays. He will learn to face himself, to hide nothing from himself- and to do so takes AN INSATIABLE CURIOSITY ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION — Uta Hagen

I had three influential teachers. The first was Uta Hagen. The second two, Bobby Lewis and my late husband, Charles Kakatsakis, were both from the Actors Studio. — June Squibb

Everything is pointing to one's own activity of looking, to an awareness and sort of hyper-consciousness of visual perception. The only way I know how to invite this experience is by removing the other things (i.e., subject matter) for you to think about. — Uta Barth

It all started with the most basic level of Uta Hagen, right at the beginning. I'm like, 'Really? I came to grad school; I'm going to do the 'Respect for Acting'?' And I realized the importance of that, because it was really to just get you to get rid of everything. Get rid of everything you've learned and just start from the bottom up. — Kunal Nayyar

We had a relationship that lasted 44 years. Herbert and I lived together 10 years before we were married. He always gave me a little heart for whatever anniversary. — Uta Hagen

The knowledge that every day there is something more to learn, something higher to reach for, something new to make for others, makes each day infinitely precious — Uta Hagen

Said Gilgamesh to him, to Uta-napishti the Distant:
'O Uta-napishti, what should I do and where should I go?
A thief has taken hold of my flesh!
For there in my bed-chamber Death does abide,
and wherever I turn, there too will be Death. — Anonymous

Thoughts and feelings are suspended in a vacuum unless they instigate and feed the selected actions, and it is the characters actions which reveal the character in the play. — Uta Hagen

The need to be loved and protected is at a peak when we feel abandoned and are particularly vulnerable to difficult circumstances. — Uta Hagen

We were not allowed to say, Screw, but we could say, Hump the hostess, because hump is in Shakespeare. — Uta Hagen

Maybe the one I enjoyed playing most was A Month in the Country. — Uta Hagen

Uta Hagen would say, there's the representational actor and the presentational actor. — Jake Gyllenhaal

One cannot demand of art that it pay you in any other way than in the satisfaction of the work itself. — Uta Hagen

Life is short, so fall in love. — Arina Tanemura

Sex is an aspect of human existence that has fallen prey in special measure to a very special form of theological science: the theological outgrowth or offshoot known as moral theology. Its biblical foundations are meager in the sense that nothing of the kind exists in the New Testament, so it has had to achieve its ambition largely by dint of its own efforts. — Uta Ranke-Heinemann

We need to have a mask that we never take off. — Sui Ishida

They still had the Lord Chamberlain, so we had this idiotic censorship. We were allowed three Jesus Christs instead of 10. Why three were OK, I don't know. — Uta Hagen

Life is brief, young maiden, fall in love; before the crimson bloom fades from your lips, before the tides of passion cool within your hips, for those of you who know no tomorrow. (Gondola no Uta) — Kouhei Kadono

I won't go to England because they won't let my dog in. — Uta Hagen

I definitely want to show how beautiful the marathon can be. I am the opponent of all those who find the marathon bad: the psychologists, the physiologists, the doubters. I make the marathon beautiful for myself and for others. That's why I'm here. — Uta Pippig

When I was sixteen and knew nothing about art, I sat through almost six hours of Andy Warhol's Empire. I did not understand it but thought: this is in a major museum, it must be important, what is going on here? I stayed until the museum closed. His Screen Test films are some of my favorite works made this century, but you need to give them back the time they took to be made. — Uta Barth

We must overcome the notion that we must be regular ... it robs you of the chance to be extraordinary and leads you to the mediocre. — Uta Hagen

For some strange reason, we believe that anyone who lived before we were born was in some peculiar way a different kind of human being from any we have come in contact with in our own lifetime. This concept must be changed; we must realize in our bones that almost everything in time and history has changed except the human being. — Uta Hagen

Talent is an amalgam of high sensitivity; easy vulnerability; high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting intensely); a vivid imagination as well as a grip on reality; the desire to communicate one's own experience and sensations, to make one's self heard and seen. — Uta Hagen

Keep pace with the present. Take a trip to the moon. envision the future. — Uta Hagen

My work never directly addresses the literal subject matter of the photograph, but attempts to ask questions about vision itself. — Uta Barth

Sexual pessimism and hostility toward the pleasures of the flesh are a legacy from the ancient world which Christianity has preserved in a special measure to this day. — Uta Ranke-Heinemann

As Uta Hagen would say, there's the representational actor and the presentational actor. My sister [Maggie Gyllenhaal] came up to me recently after she saw this movie, Southpaw, the movie I did, and she thought there was this exploration of that type of presentation, and a bit of representation as well, if I could be totally honest, where she was deeply moved. — Jake Gyllenhaal

Jesus was a friend of women, the first and practically the last friend women had in the church. — Uta Ranke-Heinemann

I can neither live with you. Nor without you. — Sui Ishida

It must be noted that it is often the colleague or direct disciple of a new thinker who gets stuck in literal interpretations of the work, tending to freeze the new ideas and language into an inflexible, static condition. — Uta Hagen

Specificity of time and place drop away and one starts to think about the picture, as much as what it is of. — Uta Barth

I am interested in the conventions of picture-making, in the desire to picture the world and in our relationship, our continual love for and fascination with pictures. — Uta Barth

Marlon was so sensitive, you thought the poor guy just had a bad education. — Uta Hagen

The actor must know that since he, himself, is the instrument, he must play on it to serve the character with the same effortless dexterity with which the violinist makes music on his. Just because he doesn't look like a violin is no reason to assume his techniques should be thought of as less difficult. — Uta Hagen

Once in awhile, there's stuff that makes me say, That's what theatre's about. It has to be a human event on the stage, and that doesn't happen very often. — Uta Hagen

Working with Brando was fun. It was like a tennis match. We played unbelievably well together. — Uta Hagen

We all expect photographs to be a picture of something. We assume that the photographer observed a place, a person, an event in the world, and wants to record it, point at it ... The problem with my work is that these images are really not of anything in that sense, they register only that which is incidental and peripheral to the implied it. — Uta Barth

I keep trying to find ways to shift the viewer's attention away from the object they are looking at and toward their own perceptual process in relation to that object. The question for me always is: how can I make you aware of your own activity of looking, instead of losing your attention to thoughts about what it is that you are looking at? — Uta Barth

I'm a bad liar; I don't know what to say backstage. — Uta Hagen