Explore Quotes by Zoe Kazan

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

Historically, art and music and writing and film have been one of the only tools that is effective against tyranny.

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.

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

It was very hard for me to come back to a place of feeling normal about food and about my body. And then, when I came to the other side of it, it felt like something was gone. An exorcism. I still experience the same chemical swings and moods and pain, but I'm much better at dealing with it than I was at 18.

I will be a broken record for justice.

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.

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.

Sometimes I feel that the people I'm writing are more real to me than the people around me. When you take that imaginative leap, you're living so much in that world.

I don't like pretentious films or pretentious people.

But my family's really close and I was interested in what Mommy and Daddy did for a living. So when Mommy and Daddy had a script that wasn't totally age inappropriate, they would let me read it. And we would talk about it.

People really do make the assumption that I had some weirdo Hollywood upbringing, but my parents are incredibly down-to-earth people who worked really hard to raise us in a way that was health.

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 love to walk around New York. Honestly, that's like the best thing, to walk over to Park Slope and go visit my friend Betty and take her dog out in the park or go walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. I really dig being outside and getting to see everybody in the street.

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.

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.

My schedule is completely different doing a play than it is doing a movie, and I actually think it's a much harder schedule because you've got to do it eight times a week and you've got to do it good eight times a week and with different kinds of audiences who are cold or drunk or tired, whatever it is.

And when I get bored, it's like the worst parts of me come out. I really veer to self-destructive tendencies quickly.

I think action should be revealed through character, so if you have a plot problem, it's probably a character problem.

I never wanted to be a playwright.

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.