Alia Shawkat (Alia Martine Shawkat) Quotes
On American TV, there just aren't a lot of female leads in comedy, especially at the peak of all the Judd Apatow stuff.
Quotes to Explore
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If you make a film too American, it won't travel. It will have no life outside of its own country.
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After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad's an English professor. After a year there, I was like, 'Jesus. I don't want to do this. I don't want to be in the library.' So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it.
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If you are attempting to study American history, and you don't understand the force of white supremacy, you fundamentally misunderstand America.
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Much of the conventional wisdom associated with Vietnam was highly inaccurate. Far from an inevitable result of the imperative to contain communism, the war was only made possible through lies and deceptions aimed at the American public, Congress, and members of Lyndon Johnson's own administration.
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Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
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For fiction, I'm not particularly nationalistic. I'm not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work.
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I was a star in Italy, Austrailia, Germany and Japan before the American stations ever paid attention at all.
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I guess when I first started speaking with an American accent, there's a tendency to create a caricature of the accent because you just exaggerate the pieces that stand out to you.
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The American Dream is that any man or woman, despite of his or her background, can change their circumstances and rise as high as they are willing to work.
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I don't just want to be a cute girl in a comedy or the actress who just does the same thing over and over again. I want to play roles that are distinct. I want to have a more varied career like actresses Viola Davis or Angela Bassett - those are the people that I grew up watching and admiring.
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An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading the one-eyed.
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British women can be slightly more reserved; Scottish are a little more crazy and fun, and American are more forthright, which I really enjoy.
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And a tiny number of people in a few states make these decisions, and we're left with these options that are increasingly not attractive to the American people.
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The major international appeal for 'House of Cards' was kind of a surprise because it's a very American show. What we learned is that American politics is very American, but greed and corruption and all of that is very global.
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Some guy refuses to fight and we call that the sin, but he's standing up for what he believes in and that seems pretty damned American to me.
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I wanted to be less well-known in comedy.
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Also, there are now new laws in Brazil which create incentives for Argentine and Latin American films to be premiered and distributed in Brazil and vice versa.
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I mean, comedy's hard. If you go back and look at the first season of 'Seinfeld,' it's a work in progress and that's what happens. It just takes time for people to figure each other out, and figure out timing, and to develop creatively with the writers.
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As an actor, it's a very strange adjustment to start playing the father. I was used to playing a kid my whole life, and then all of a sudden, it's like, boom. I guess when I let my hair go grey, things changed.
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My career? I never think of it as a 'career.' Art and music and all those things that I'm creating are just part of me.
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See, I will always shop, and that's sort of a problem. Clothes are always exploding out of my closet!
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I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous.
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Human darkness fascinates me; I find it intriguing. And there are few female characters who are explored in this light.
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On American TV, there just aren't a lot of female leads in comedy, especially at the peak of all the Judd Apatow stuff.
