A film director has to get a shot, no matter what he does. We're desperate people.
- Elia Kazan Quote

A good director's not sure when he gets on the set what he's going to do.
- Elia Kazan Quote

Anybody who informs on other people is doing something disturbing and even disgusting.
- Elia Kazan Quote

Every fighter has one fight that makes or breaks him.
- Elia Kazan Quote

For years after I resigned, I was still faithful to their way of thinking. But not in the American Communists.
- Elia Kazan Quote

Hey, you must be doin' good, 'cause I never hear from you.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I don't remember anything anybody said in any Jack Ford picture. Nothing happens except action.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I hate the Communists and have for many years and don't feel right about giving up my career to defend them. I will give up my film career if it is in the interests of defending something I believe in, but not this.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I have no spy stories to tell, because I saw no spies. Nor did I understand, at that time, any opposition between American and Russian national interest.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I joined the Communist Party late in 1934. I got out a year and a half later.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I like directors who come on the set and create something that's a little dangerous, difficult or unusual.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I owe Bankhead a gift; she made a director out of me.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I said to Tennessee, this thing is becoming the Marlon Brando show.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I think there should be collaboration, but under my thumb.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I truly believe that all power corrupts. Such is probably the thinking behind every political film ever made in Hollywood.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I value peace when it is not bought at the price of fundamental decencies.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I want to thank the Academy for its courage and generosity.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I was both very successful and very left; the living demonstration of how you could be on the left and still be in the gossip columns and be envied for the money you made.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I was not a collective person or a bohemian; I was an elitist.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I was taken in by what might be called the Hard Times version of the Communists' advertising or recruiting technique.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I was the hero of the young insurgent working class art movement.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I was very intense. I think it's a privilege to be an actor.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I would rather do what I did than crawl in front of a ritualistic Left and lie the way those other comrades did betray my own soul.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I wouldn't go up on a stage now if you paid a thousand dollars for one minute of acting. It's a nasty experience. You're up there all by yourself. You're so damn exposed.
- Elia Kazan Quote

I'm small, but I'm neither compliant nor agreeable.
- Elia Kazan Quote

Miller didn't write Death of a Salesman. He released it. It was there inside him, waiting to be turned loose. That's the measure of its merit.
- Elia Kazan Quote

Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
- Elia Kazan Quote

The Communists automatically violated the daily practices of democracy to which I was accustomed.
- Elia Kazan Quote

The first thing you should do with an actor is not sign a contract with him. Take him to dinner. And take him for a walk afterwards.
- Elia Kazan Quote

The more ambivalent you are and the more uncertain you are, then you can get something that you cannot anticipate.
- Elia Kazan Quote

The physical life of the scene is determined by whether the set squeezes people together or whether the set has an escape place in it.
- Elia Kazan Quote

The world was like a huge red carpet out ahead of me to be walked on. And it stretched on and on, no end.
- Elia Kazan Quote

The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal.
- Elia Kazan Quote

There was no doubt that there was a vast organization which was making fools of all the liberals in Hollywood and taking their money, that there was a police state among the Left element in Hollywood and Broadway.
- Elia Kazan Quote

Very often the Group actor is a critic when he's acting and an actor when he's criticizing.
- Elia Kazan Quote

Whatever hysteria exists is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it.
- Elia Kazan Quote

When you know what an actor has, you can reach in and arouse it. If you don't know what he has, you don't know what the hell is going on.
- Elia Kazan Quote

You have no idea how fragile an actor's self-worth is.
- Elia Kazan Quote

You have to remind people of their own struggles. It's a responsibility.
- Elia Kazan Quote