- Even if the good old days never existed, the fact that we can conceive such a world is, in fact, an affirmation of the human spirit.
- [commenting on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
- I'm not very fond of movies. I don't go to them much.
- I started at the top and worked down.
- I'm not bitter about Hollywood's treatment of me, but over its treatment of [D.W. Griffith], [Josef von Sternberg], [Erich von Stroheim], [Buster Keaton] and a hundred others.
- Movie directing is the perfect refuge for the mediocre.
- [on Hollywood in the 1980s) We live in a snake pit here . . . I hate it but I just don't allow myself to face the fact that I hold it in contempt because it keeps on turning out to be the only place to go.
- I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
- I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.
- If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girl friends. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys.
- I hate it when people pray on the screen. It's not because I hate praying, but whenever I see an actor fold his hands and look up in the spotlight, I'm lost. There's only one other thing in the movies I hate as much, and that's sex. You just can't get in bed or pray to God and convince me on the screen.
- [on Citizen Kane (1941) being colorized] Keep Ted Turner and his goddamned Crayolas away from my movie.
- [at RKO Pictures working on "Heart of Darkness", a film he later abandoned] This is the biggest electric train set a boy ever had!
- For thirty years people have been asking me how I reconcile X with Y! The truthful answer is that I don't. Everything about me is a contradiction and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There is a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.
- My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.
- I think I'm . . . I made essentially a mistake staying in movies, because I . . . but it . . . it's the mistake I can't regret because it's like saying, "I shouldn't have stayed married to that woman, but I did because I love her." I would have been more successful if I'd left movies immediately. Stayed in the theater, gone into politics, written-- anything. I've wasted the greater part of my life looking for money, and trying to get along . . . trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paint box which is an . . . a movie. And I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with a movie. It's about 2% movie making and 98% hustling. It's no way to spend a life.
- I think it is always a tremendously good formula in any art form to admit the limitations of the form.
- I don't pray because I don't want to bore God.
- A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
- I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theater, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.
- The word "genius" was whispered into my ear, the first thing I ever heard, while I was still mewling in my crib. So it never occurred to me that I wasn't until middle age.
- I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time
- I'm not rich. Never have been. When you see me in a bad movie as an actor (I hope not as a director), it is because a good movie has not been offered to me. I often make bad films in order to live.
- Everybody denies that I am genius - but nobody ever called me one.
- A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.
- Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.
- I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don't think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.
- Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.
- Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad, except you never know when luxury is going to stand up.
- I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.
- If spiritually you're part of the cat family, you can't bear to be laughed at. You have to pretend when you fall down that you really wanted to be down there to see what's under the sofa. The rest of us don't at all mind being laughed at.
- [on his favorite directors] I prefer the old masters; by which I mean: John Ford, John Ford and John Ford.
- [on James Cagney] No one was more unreal and stylized, yet there is no moment when he was not true.
- [on René Clair] A real master: he invented his own Paris, which is better than recording it.
- [on Federico Fellini] His films are a small-town boy's dream of a big city. His sophistication works because it is the creation of someone who doesn't have it. But he shows dangerous signs of being a superlative artist with little to say.
- [on Edward G. Robinson] An immensely effective actor.
- The optimists are incapable of understanding what it means to adore the impossible.
- A movie studio is the best toy a boy ever had.
- On Stanley Kubrick: Among the young generation, Kubrick strikes me as a giant.
- [to Dick Cavett] I'm always sorry to hear that anybody I admire has been an actor . . . When did you go straight?
- I don't think history can possibly be true. Possibly! I'll tell you why. We all know people who get things written about, and we know that they're lies written. I told a story to Buck Henry, last year in Weymouth, and he told the story that he thought I told him to a newspaper that I read the other day, and it bears not the *slightest* resemblance to what I said! Now, that's an intelligent man, a year later, meaning me well, and that's the gospel according to Buck Henry, and it's totally apocryphal. Imagine what nonsense everything else is!
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