"As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it's the aspect."

"If I had only one film in the world to save, it would be 'Grand Illusion.'"

"Why spend 18 hours watching someone else's war, when you know how it comes out? We win, and then have to buy all their cars."

"Old age is the only disease you dont want to be cured of."

"The trouble with a movie is that it's old before it's released. It's no accident that it comes in a can."

"I don't regard my career as something so precious that it comes before my convictions."

"The basic and essential human is the woman."

"I don't think any word can explain a man's life."

"I don't pray really, because I don't want to bore God."

"We will sell no wine before its time."

"I never make my mind up about anything at all, until it's over and done with."

"A movie studio is the best toy a boy ever had."

"The truth about any man can only be calculated by the sum of everything that has been said about him."

"I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom. I mark only the happy hours, like the sundial, because otherwise I would have gone nuts."

"I don't take art as seriously as politics."

"I discovered at the age of six that everything was a phony, worked with mirrors. Since then, I've always wanted to be a magician."

"I'm a lurid character!"

"It would be so much better if the critics would come, not on first nights, but on last nights, when they could exercise their undoubted flair for funeral orations."

"My definition of success is not having things thrown at me!"

"[The movies] make the sort of comment only a novel can make, an allusion to the world in which people live, the psychological and economic motivations, the influences of the period in which they lived."

"You could write all the IDEAS of all the movies, my own included, on the head of a pin."

"Hollywood expects you to experiment but on a film that makes money and if you don't make money, you're to blame. Your job is to make money."

"A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own."

"When television came along, I'd already done more than 10 years of radio work and I thought everyone would want me. I sat around waiting for the phone to ring - and it didn't."

"I don't pray because I don't want to bore God."

"Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there."

"I must be sincere towards what I am. ... Experimenting is the only thing that fills me with enthusiasm. ... It is the only sphere where I feel really honest and sincere."

"I love moving around from town to town. I never got on a train in my life without my spirits rising."

"Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of failure with a death in it. But there is more lost paradise in them than defeat."

"By nature, I am an experimentalist. I don't believe much in accomplishment."

"Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me."

"FDR used to say, 'You and I are the two best actors in America'."

"There are a thousand ways of playing a good classic. If it were effective, I would play Hamlet on a trapeze."

"I have all the equipment to be a politician. Total shamelessness."

"I'm a provincial. I live very much like a hermit: reading, listening to music, working in the cutting room, writing, commercial work - which doesn't take up that much time."

"One shouldn't ever be conscious of the author as lecturer. When social or moral points are too heavily stressed, I always get uncomfortable."

"Husbands should revolt from time to time. Even the best circus-number becomes boring if the beast is too tame."

"Computers combine things to make new knowledge at such high speed that we cannot absorb it."

"There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present."

"I'd make my promises now if I wasn't so busy arranging to keep them."

"A movie in production is the greatest train set a boy could ever have."

"Criticism is the essence of creation."

"I would just like to mention Robert Houdin who in the eighteenth century invented the vanishing birdcage trick and the theater matinee - may he rot and perish. Good afternoon."

"I dont believe in learning from other peoples pictures. I think you should learn from your own interior vision of things and discover, as I say, Innocently, as though there had never been anybody."

"Crooks aren't the worst people, just the stupidest. The fleas of the world."

"Human nature is eternal; therefore one who follows his nature keeps his original nature, in the end."

"Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy."

"If I don't like somebody's looks, I don't like them."

"I'm never certain of a performance - my own or the other actors' - or the script or anything... But to me it seems there's only one place in the world the camera can be, and the decision usually comes immediately."

"I've always found it very... sanitary to be broke."