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

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

"The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age."

"I feel I have to protect myself against things. So I'm pretty careful to lose most of them."

"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."

"I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man."

"The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left."

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

"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."

Nothing has happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.

"Look at the real prodigies, and I look like nothing compared to them."

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

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

"I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time."

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

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

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

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

"I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could."

"Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest."

"I started at the top and worked my way down."

"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."

"Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre."

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

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

"The first thing one must remember about film is that it is a young medium. And it is essential for every responsible artist to cultivate the ground that has been left fallow."

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

"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."

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

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

"Gluttony is not a secret vice."

"When you are down and out something always turns up - and it is usually the noses of your friends."

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

"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."

"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 girlfriends."

"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations."

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

"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."

"I have no great message to the world."

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

"I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment."

"I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time."

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

"Fake is as old as the Eden tree."

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

"My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people."

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

"I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai."

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

"Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in senate."