You've got to keep fighting; you've got to risk your life every six months to stay alive.
Elia KazanRead
You have no idea how fragile an actor's self-worth is.
Interpretation
An actor's sense of value is often dependent on external validation, making it fragile.
This quote by Elia Kazan highlights the vulnerability that actors face regarding their self-esteem. Since their worth is frequently measured by public reception and critical acclaim, it creates a precarious situation where external opinions can significantly impact their self-image, revealing a deeper truth about the nature of self-worth in creative professions.
In practice
In discussions about mental health in the entertainment industry, this quote can highlight the demands actors face.
You've got to keep fighting; you've got to risk your life every six months to stay alive.
Acting... was the biggest charge I ever had. What other artist has it so good? Approval so quick?
I've come to believe that everything worth achieving is beyond one's capacity - or seems so at first. The thing is to persist, not back off, fight your fight, pay your dues, and carry on. Effort is all; continue and you may get there despite everything.
A good director's not sure when he gets on the set what he's going to do.
To be a member of the Communist Party is to have a taste of the police state. It is a diluted taste but it is bitter and unforgettable.
I've lost many of my best friends... I'm going to satisfy myself now, not the critics, not even my friends.
Contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened.
So I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed
An awareness of death encourages us to live more intensely.
When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.
Way back in the 1970s, I was eating a steak, and I looked down, and for the first time it suddenly looked like flesh to me - like a dead creature. In a flash, I realized that every time I ate any kind of meat, something had been killed for me, and I stopped eating all animals, not just cows and pigs but chickens and fish.
The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.
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