"It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one."

"We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon and to prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own."

"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."

"One should make movies innocently - the way Adam and Eve named the animals, their first day in the garden. Learn from your own interior vision of things, as if there had never been a D.W.Griffith, or a Eisenstein, or a [John] Ford, or a [Jean] Renoir, or anybody."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"...as no one can be just without love, so no one can truly report without understanding."

"Books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!"

"When a man dreams his own dream, he is the sport of his dream; when Another gives it him, that Other is able to fulfill it."