Quotes from Lee Grant

I watch a lot of television. The stuff that they're putting on television, series like 'The Americans' and 'Game of Thrones,' it's so superior to most of the films that are coming out of Hollywood in terms of drama, certainly in terms of what we're interested in.

A lot of very, very big stars were going down and not being seen or heard from again. Kirk took a huge chance in putting a blacklisted writer's name on the screen and somehow or other, he survived it, like he survives everything.

Usually, the worst films become cult films.

Every actor in the room honored Sidney for being there so many years before. And everybody was so moved to be at a place where history was being made again. It was tangible.

I know what you go through when you learn someone close to you has died.

I was 24 when I was blacklisted. I was 36 when I got off the blacklist. How much of a life does an actress have in L.A. past 25? ... I was really scared of having producers know that I was on my way to 40.

I find that the stuff on television is more exciting than the films, which are for teens almost.

You can take your life into your own hands in terms of directing. There are ways for you to finance yourself and to write and make a film.

First of all, the leads aren't the kind of acting work that I like. The parts that are meatier are not the ones that have to have a romance.

When I was on stage in the '50s, it was a glory time, a golden time with Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. There was real talent. And now, the theater is a little Disney-fied.

When I became a director, I wanted to convince a very reluctant Sidney into allowing me to go on the journey of his life. Sidney had gone ahead of every other African American actor.

From the time she was born, until she was fifteen, I didn't know where I left off and she began. We were joined at the hip or the heart or the brain.

The best actors just stay in the moment,and whatever happens in the scene is a genuine surprise. You really do not know what's going to happen next. But living that out in life is very dangerous because it throws you into a place where you don't know if you're going to survive.

You dont need a love scene to show love.

This is our lives. The way to give it dignity is to tell the truth.

I was such a New Yorker, I hardly knew what the Oscars were.

I don't think I fit the Marilyn Maxwell mode.

Since I'd developed this fear of not remembering my lines, I took 'Mulholland Drive' as a test for myself. It was a long monologue: no one else speaks.

My instinct was that it was Sidney's childhood in the Bahamas that gave him the fearlessness to fight racism. So this documentary was a kind of rounding out of what had begun in that scene in In the Heat of the Night.

Its a very good feeling to be around a man who thinks women are juicy.

I've been married to one Marxist and one Fascist, and neither one would take the garbage out.

People break down after a couple of hours. All the defenses go down, and there's a kind of communication that if I spent 20 years in a living room with one of these people, I would never, never know as much about them as I do in that one day.

I was married to a Fascist and I was married to a Marxist and neither one of them ever took out the garbage.

Alfred's sister, Olive Deering, was famous in those years for her sentiments during her filming of the endless DeMille epic The Ten Commandments: "Who do I have to fuck to get off this picture?")