"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."

"In the theater there are 1,500 cameras rolling at the same time - in the cinema, only one."

"A director is someone who presides over a series of accidents."

"Hollywood is a gold-plated suburb suitable for golfers, gardeners, assorted middlemen, and contented movies stars. I am none of these things."

"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."

"A long-playing full shot is what always separates the men from the boys. Anybody can make movies with a pair of scissors and a two-inch lens."

"You're beautful. Yes you are, you're very very beautiful. Extremely beautiful."

"It isn't worth it. No money is worth this... [walks out]"

"The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world."

"What's happening now is what happened before, and often what's going to happen again sometime or other"

"An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be."

"Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing."

"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."

"I'm one of those fellows so frightened of driving that I go 80 miles an hour - and the more frightened I get, the faster I go."

"A poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a director an army."

"The director is simply the audience. His job is to preside over accidents."

"The director is the most overrated artist in the world. He is the only artist who, with no talent whatsoever, can be a success for 50 years without his lack of talent ever being discovered."

"I hate women, hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never really learns anything about them. They are inscrutable."

"I look back on my life and it’s 95% running around trying to raise money to make movies and 5% actually making them. It’s no way to live."