Quotes from Carol Kane

I want to be Geraldine Page; I want to be one of the greats.

When I had my dogs, I used to spend a lot of time in Central Park, which is a great place to be alone among a lot of people.

I just love the black and white movies.

I don't like somebody saying to me in their performance, 'Look at this. Isn't this funny?' I pray that I don't do that. I'm sure I fall off the horse every once in a while, but I try not to.

New York, to me, even though I grew up here, there's something magical about it. I remember, every time I used to go to L.A. for work, when I'd come back and get off the plane and be driving towards the landscape of the city, I'd be beside myself with joy. It doesn't matter how many times!

I didn't know I wanted to go into entertainment, but I knew I wanted to be on stage when I was about seven. I saw a play, like most kids do, at a children's theater in Cleveland, and I just saw them up there, and I thought, 'that's where I want to be.'

I don't like that I'm my own commodity, that I am what I sell.

I try to construct some kind of backstory for my character so that I have an idea of the life of that character - not just from the moment when the scene starts, but from before.

That's when the great stuff happens, when you're not checking yourself all the time, being critical of yourself and what other people are doing.

As I get older, I start to look back at the field that I've crossed and realize that it was a mine field.

Life is very cyclical. And my career has been very-high-very-low, very-high-very-low, and I think it'll probably keep on rolling that way.

And my first film was Carnal Knowledge, another amazing experience, largely because of Mike Nichols, who would tell me you can't do anything wrong because you're doing everything right.

My preference is for really good writing, and I just really don't care where it is.

'Taxi' made a big difference because it got me into comedy.

It's totally mystifying to me how anyone could have canceled 'Taxi.' I don't understand it because that stuff is rare.

I guess I'm lucky in that I started working very young in all three of the mediums. I started in stage first, and then I moved into film, also very young, and when I did 'Taxi,' for instance, it was live in front of an audience but also filmed; that was a fun combination.

This is a grueling profession. Either you can't get work, or you can't get certain kinds of parts, or you get a part, and it kills you because it's not good enough, or you get successful and feel guilty about it.

I always wanted to be a good actress and a serious actress. I wasn't in the profession to, quote-unquote, meet the stars.

There's nothing obvious or predictable in acting. That's what it means to be in this profession.

There are directors who don't cast you for the way you act but for the way you are, the way you behave around the dinner table.

Sometimes every single element of a character is a torturous discovery.

I don't like to discuss my work in a lot of detail; I'm afraid of dissecting it in a way that is not good for me.

You can fake a lot of stuff, but you can't fake if the story isn't there and if the writing isn't good.

I don't feel that I have any great grasp of technique that I should pass along to people.