Top 33 Zoe Kazan Quotes

I almost never write because I want something from my audience. Almost everything I’ve ever written, I’ve written because I feel like I have to write this or I’ll die. Like, this has to come out of me.

I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays.

Every role requires its own set of tools, and I think, because of that, it is very hard to ever feel totally prepared or totally able.

I encourage everyone to read James Baldwin and Malcom X and Aldous Huxley. To read Primo Levi. To read ‘Silent Spring.’ To read Toni Morrison. To read Zora Neale Hurston.

I never wanted to be a playwright.

I always wrote. My parents are writers. It just seemed like something people did.

I find playwriting really painful. I love it, or I wouldn’t do it, but I don’t love the theater as much as I love movies.

Nothing’s going to come to you by sitting around and waiting for it.

My hero is Michelle Williams, who I grew close to when we did ‘Meek’s Cutoff.’ She’s an extraordinary actor and mom.

Well, I have a sister that I’m very close with, and that relationship is probably the most intense relationship of my life to date, probably of my life, period.

People are always asking me – because of my family – if I ever feel pressure or feel like I have something to live up to. And having that in the back of my head, I’ve just learned to be really brave even in the face of feeling ill-prepared.

I think a famous parent is really different from a famous grandparent. My parents are very successful, but no one knows who they are, and they live a completely grounded, homey life. I’m friends with the Gummer girls, whose mum is Meryl Streep, and that feels from the outside like a different kind of burden.

In New York you can just walk out and be among people. You’re on the subway among people, you go to cafes, you can talk to people.

Maybe this is a way of gaslighting myself, but I think of it this way: In certain circles, my grandpa was considered to be one of the seminal directors of the 20th century. I’m never going to be that. So I might as well do whatever I want.

And I think the female creative urge is intrinsically biologically linked to our ability to give birth to a child, even if we’ve never… I’ve never given birth, but I feel like it’s part of our psychology.

Turning 30 changed me in ways I didn’t expect. For the very first time, I felt like my life is valuable. Not my life because I’m putting something good into the world or I’m well-respected in my field, but my life as a human being on this planet for a limited amount of time.

When I look back, I can say that the summer when I was 19 was a formative time for me. But at the time I just thought I was making tofu every night for dinner and going to work.

I’m a very serious person. Unfortunately, sometimes.

I don’t want to do every independent film offered to me.

I took a writing class in college, liked it, and my first year out of school I couldn’t get a job, so I wrote a play.

I think film writing, you’re thinking in pictures, and stage writing, you’re thinking in dialogue. In film writing, it’s also, you only get so many words, so everything has to earn its place in a really economical way. I think for stage writing, you have more leeway.

I do feel like I have the superpower of not caring about my body as an actor.

When I’m writing, I look like a fool because the parts are moving through me and I’m crying and laughing and making faces.

I will be a broken record for justice.

Writing-wise, I like to have a lot of things on the burners at once, because when I hit a wall, I like to move on to the thing I haven’t hit a wall on.

I’m klutzy, and I don’t embarrass easily.

There’s something really earnest inside me all the time. It’s not a cool or fun way to be. Sometimes I would like to experience being someone who’s not wired the way I’m wired.

The causes for my eating disorder ran along the usual lines: depression, an inability to express my rage, a desire to exert control, a desire to feel less, a desire to have my body express the things my voice could not. That, and I had gotten in the habit of believing it was better to take up less space.

When ‘Ruby Sparks’ came out, I had to do so many interviews where I had to explain the film and my politics. And I think there was a willful misunderstanding by some people. They thought the movie was trying to perpetrate the thing the movie was deconstructing.

If I ever feel that acting is just soul-sucking and I don’t want to do it anymore, I could stop.

I grew up speaking Spanish. The woman who helped raise me was only Spanish-speaking, so it was one of my primary languages as a kid. And I lived in Spain for a while.

I grew up in L.A., and I don’t think I’ve seen L.A. onscreen in a way that felt real to me. There are definitely movies, but they are few and far between.

I have mad luck. I’m super-good at games like backgammon or anything that requires rolling dice.