Brit Marling Quotes - Page 2

I think the first thing I thought when I got out to L.A. was just: Oh, if I want to act, I have to find a different way to go about it because the parts for girls are as dispiriting as the banking jobs. You have to really be willing to invent, I guess, a different path for yourself.

Life and death and birth is this fantastic mystery that we cannot fully grasp.

I feel like developing the muscle of my imagination became a way to survive reality.

So much of the world is being brought up on these stories that Hollywood is coming up with and exporting all over. They have so much power and influence, so it's really important that they represent women properly.

For some reason, I have a very strange conception of time. I am constantly hovering at some overview, more macro.

I couldn't be a novelist for instance. It feels like a very lonely endeavor. I don't know that I could survive the solitude of that.

Life is beautiful because it doesn't last.

Having spent a lot of time trying to figure out screenwriting, I do feel moved and I want to try to write good roles for women of every age.

I get uncomfortable when people give me presents and watch me open them. I don't have birthday parties, because the idea of a group of people singing and looking at me while I'm blowing out candles gives me hives.

When I'm sitting writing, I know that something works if I've made myself cry, or laugh, or have a visceral emotion.

I think I realized very early on that you can spend a lot of time constructing a really perfect scene in final draft and just end up throwing it away because you didn't figure out that mathematics of the story first.

One of the things that's awesome about being an actor is that you get to do stories, live lives and have experiences that you never could have even conceived of, and that's because you're living in another writer's imagination and another director's imagination.

I think what's so attractive about acting is that you get to live several lifetimes in one.

People go to the cinema to be moved; they wanna laugh, they wanna cry, they wanna feel something deeply, especially if they're not feeling deeply in their own lives.

When I go into a pitch room and I'm pitching something with a writing partner, everybody tends to look at the guy, even if I'm doing a lot of the talking.

The most intoxicating thing about being an actor is to surrender to a story that you never would have come up with.

You are the sum total of the choices you make every day.

I learned from my parents the idea that, if you are devoted enough and you want to study something enough, you can really teach yourself anything.

I think sometimes big budget means explosions! CGI! CGI, the possibilities are so limitless that it begins to be impractical.

It seems to be this hot-bed for these ideas and bringing these groups together. You find that the one thing that everybody has in common, whether they're a teenager who has run away from his parents, or a divorcee who lost her husband, is that they all have in common this feeling of searching for a meaning in their lives.

I'd studied theater growing up and loved that, but didn't have many examples of artists around me.

Modern life has gotten so strange, we all get 150 emails and text messages a day, and it's hard when things are moving that quickly to keep that sense of wonder about being alive.

So writing became a way to get to act in things that I thought were meaningful, and hopefully write stronger roles for other women.

When I was a kid and going to the movies I was overwhelmed by the way women were always second-class citizens in the film.

A lot of people think, 'I'll give acting or poetry or filmmaking a try. And if it doesn't work out I'll go get a law degree, do something else that's more practical.' For me I went the reverse way. I lived the back-up plan.