Martin Landau

Life is a roller coaster. There are ups; there are downs. There are hills; there are valleys, peaks, and so on.

Actors need to trust themselves. If you trust yourself, you can trust others and leave the director outside.

I love to see lack of clarity in a performance as well as clarity, as well as trust, as well as the kinds of things that human beings go through. I love to see spontaneity and 'inevitability.' How it gets there is going to shock the hell out of me, but it will get there somehow.

Mankind, his brain has embraced so many amazing things, and yet we're still beating each other over the heads with clubs, excepting the bullets now, one bullet can wipe out an entire city.

My best stuff as a teacher was always to find the problems within each individual actor, and I'll suggest things that I know that particular actor will have difficulty with.

I studied with Strasberg, Elia Kazan. They raised the bar. They weren't easy to please, and they made you achieve the best you could do. That's what a teacher does: he infuses you with passion for something.

People think I'm a very serious actor, which I am. But you know, if you don't have a sense of humor doing what I do, you perish.