76 Quotes by James Lipton

And I thought, my God, there's an off chance that they will say something that's really worth preserving and there is one way to do that and I knew what it was because I come from television.

And I thought if I don't pre-interview - first of all, we couldn't afford it - but the second thing was it would force me to do my own research, which takes two weeks.

The first people who responded were Arthur Penn and Sally Field and Dennis Hopper and Alec Baldwin and Paul Newman.

I'd been on everybody else's show and there was always a preinterview. Somebody would come with a tape recorder and you'd talk for three or four hours, and they'd take it back and it would be transcribed, and it would be given to the writers, those many writers you see on all those shows, Larry King, Letterman, Leno, etc. And then they choose the answers that will be most evocative on their show.

I'll miss it until the day I die, and I'm convinced to this day that I can get on a horse and jump a course of fences satisfactorily. It doesn't leave you.

When I went to school, my intention was to be a lawyer. When I attended university that was still the clear intention; I was going to be a lawyer. Why? Because it was as far as I could get from my father's antics and world. I thought that the world of the arts probably led people into the kind of behavior I had seen with him and that had resulted in a lot of hard times for my mother and me.

I became a professional actor in Detroit and I was able to earn some money. It was a good job because it permitted me to study. It fit perfectly with school.

I stopped writing at the age of 18. I had written incessantly before that. I read, of course, because I was in university, but I wasn't going to write. I wasn't going to do any of those dangerous things. I was going to be a stolid, bourgeois lawyer.

There are still actors who use emotional memory, affective memory, which was Lee Strasberg's emphasis, not his total emphasis. She taught everything at the Actor's Studio. But nevertheless, she felt that it impeded her.