Top 30 Lee Grant Quotes

I was 22, and 40 was old. To be 40 again!

This is our lives. The way to give it dignity is to tell the truth.

I watch a lot of television. The stuff that they’re putting on television, series like ‘The Americans’ and ‘Game of Thrones,’ it’s so superior to most of the films that are coming out of Hollywood in terms of drama, certainly in terms of what we’re interested in.

You don’t need a love scene to show love.

A lot of very, very big stars were going down and not being seen or heard from again. Kirk took a huge chance in putting a blacklisted writer’s name on the screen and somehow or other, he survived it, like he survives everything.

I am proud of Kirk. I think he drums to his own drummer in every way.

Every actor in the room honored Sidney for being there so many years before. And everybody was so moved to be at a place where history was being made again. It was tangible.

I’ve been married to one Marxist and one Fascist, and neither one would take the garbage out.

The best actors just stay in the moment,and whatever happens in the scene is a genuine surprise. You really do not know what’s going to happen next. But living that out in life is very dangerous because it throws you into a place where you don’t know if you’re going to survive.

First of all, the leads aren’t the kind of acting work that I like. The parts that are meatier are not the ones that have to have a romance.

I was such a Jewish princess. My whole life was leading up to marrying a rich man and living on 48th Street.

People break down after a couple of hours. All the defenses go down, and there’s a kind of communication that if I spent 20 years in a living room with one of these people, I would never, never know as much about them as I do in that one day.

I was 24 when I was blacklisted. I was 36 when I got off the blacklist. How much of a life does an actress have in L.A. past 25? … I was really scared of having producers know that I was on my way to 40.

I know what you go through when you learn someone close to you has died.

I’ve made a five-minute video on ‘The Battering of Hillary Clinton.’

I find that the stuff on television is more exciting than the films, which are for teens almost.

You can take your life into your own hands in terms of directing. There are ways for you to finance yourself and to write and make a film.

When I was on stage in the ’50s, it was a glory time, a golden time with Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. There was real talent. And now, the theater is a little Disney-fied.

After the Oscar for ‘Shampoo,’ I had a sense, even as I was walking up to get it, that this was the height of where I was going to go as an actress. And I felt that now was the time, if I wanted a longer life in the arts, that I had to jump from acting to directing.

Kirk is a man, and he loves it. He loves women.

I pretty much always stuck to the most interesting part I could play.

I did my very first film with Kirk in Detective Story when he was the greatest, greatest star in the world. I fell in love with him, had a crush on him then.

Film and television were out. I was 24, and it went on until I was 36. For an actor, those are your years. I got a great urgency and education during the blacklist, and it made me grow up in a way I never could have before, and in very good ways, too.

When I became a director, I wanted to convince a very reluctant Sidney into allowing me to go on the journey of his life. Sidney had gone ahead of every other African American actor.

Since I’d developed this fear of not remembering my lines, I took ‘Mulholland Drive’ as a test for myself. It was a long monologue: no one else speaks.

I started writing to reassure myself that I was still all here.

My instinct was that it was Sidney’s childhood in the Bahamas that gave him the fearlessness to fight racism. So this documentary was a kind of rounding out of what had begun in that scene in In the Heat of the Night.

It’s a very good feeling to be around a man who thinks women are juicy.

I was such a New Yorker, I hardly knew what the Oscars were.

What goes on between a father and a son, which is usually such a private matter, is that they are able to be honest with each other, and be honest with me, as a director. It’s just remarkable.