A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.

The best thing commercially, which is the worst artistically, by and large, is the most successful.

Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.

I was spoiled in a very strange way as a child, because everybody told me, from the moment I was able to hear, that I was absolutely marvelous, and I never heard a discouraging word for years, you see. I didn't know what was ahead of me.

I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.

'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.

Now I'm an old Christmas tree, the roots of which have died. They just come along and while the little needles fall off me replace them with medallions.

Personally, I don't like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she'll fool her husband, I figure she'll fool me.

I've never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies... Egotism and laziness. And they're all lit like television shows.

On my tombstone, I want written: 'He never did 'Love Boat!'

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.

Fake is as old as the Eden tree.

The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.

If you've noticed that I don't use long takes, it's not because I don't like them, but because no one gives me the necessary means to treat myself to them. It's more economical to make one image, then this image and then that image, and try to control them later, in the editing studio.

I don't want to forgive myself. That's why I hate psychoanalysis I think if you're guilty of something you should live with it. Get rid of it - how can you get rid of a real guilt? I think people should live with it, face up to it.

I am essentially a hack, a commercial person. If I had a hobby, I would immediately make money on it or abandon it.

I can think of nothing that an audience won't understand. The only problem is to interest them; once they are interested, they understand anything in the world.

Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one!

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

I know people who have a much better recollection of their childhood than I do. They remember very well when they were a year and a half and two years old. I've only one or two daguerreotypes that come to mind.

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

In my real movie-going days, which were the thirties, you didn't stand in line. You strolled down the street and sallied into the theater at any hour of the day or night.

Film is like a colony and there are very few colonists.

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.

People are losing the capacity to listen to words or follow ideas.

Criminals are never very amusing. It's because they're failures. Those who make real money aren't counted as criminals. This is a class distinction, not an ethical problem.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Did you ever stop to think why cops are always famous for being dumb? Simple. Because they don't have to be anything else.

The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism.

Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.

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

Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.

I never said I was a genius.

Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.

I don't like television when it gets near to photographed plays.

They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.

The two things you cannot do effectively on stage are pray and copulate.

See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike. I'm profoundly convinced that that's a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. Bosnians have short necks.

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

Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant.

My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.

There were centuries when civilization had no theater.

My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.

At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.

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

I have made an art form of the interview. The French are the best interviewers, despite their addiction to the triad, like all Cartesians.

If I ever own a restaurant, I will never allow the waiters to ask if the diners like their dishes. Particularly when they're talking.

Everything bad that has ever happened to me has been caused by agents or lawyers.

I've spent most of my mature life trying to prove that I'm not irresponsible.