'Batman' took 10 months to film, and by the time I stopped working on it, it took a long time before my English accent came out again. I was actually having to try for it.

I've always felt that I would rather see an actor, writer, or musician's work, rather than actually know the person. If you know too much about an artist, it somehow lessens their ability to do their work as well.

“It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.”

“There is no substitute for work.”

If you want to work on your art, work on your life.

“If this country is ever demoralized, it will come from trying to live without work.” 

"Wanting to be an actor and wanting to be famous are different."

“As a rule of thumb, a manager whose work is largely supervisory should have six to eight subordinates; three or four are too few and ten are too many. This range comes from a guideline that a manager should allocate about a half day per week to each of his subordinates.”

“We have now turned things into a continuous operation at the expense of flexibility, and we can no longer prepare each customer’s order exactly when and how he requests it. So our customers have to adjust their expectations if they want to enjoy the benefits of our new mode: lower cost and more predictable product quality.”

“Because each alternative costs money, your task is to find the most cost-effective way to deploy your resources—the key to optimizing all types of productive work. Bear in mind that in this and in other such situations there is a right answer, the one that can give you the best delivery time and product quality at the lowest possible cost. To find that right answer, you must develop a clear understanding of the trade-offs between the various factors—manpower, capacity, and inventory—and you must reduce the understanding to a quantifiable set of relationships.”

“People who plan have to have the guts, honesty, and discipline to drop projects as well as to initiate them, to shake their heads “no” as well as to smile “yes.”

“What is important is the thinking you force yourself to go through to understand the relationship between the various aspects of your production process.”

“What is important is the thinking you force yourself to go through to understand the relationship between the various aspects of your production process.”

“But at least you know that alternatives do exist: equipment capacity, manpower, and inventory can be traded off against each other and then balanced against delivery time.”

“To use your calendar as a production-planning tool, you must accept responsibility for two things: 1. You should move toward the active use of your calendar, taking the initiative to fill the holes between the time-critical events with non-time-critical though necessary activities. 2. You should say “no” at the outset to work beyond your capacity to handle. It is important to say “no” earlier rather than later because we’ve learned that to wait until something reaches a higher value stage and then abort due to lack of capacity means losing more money and time.”

“To use your calendar as a production-planning tool, you must accept responsibility for two things: 1. You should move toward the active use of your calendar, taking the initiative to fill the holes between the time-critical events with non-time-critical though necessary activities. 2. You should say “no” at the outset to work beyond your capacity to handle.”

“Leading indicators give you one way to look inside the black box by showing you in advance what the future might look like. And because they give you time to take corrective action, they make it possible for you to avoid problems.”

“alternatives do exist: equipment capacity, manpower, and inventory can be traded off against each other and then balanced against delivery time.”

“Monitoring the results of delegation resembles the monitoring used in quality assurance. We should apply quality assurance principles and monitor at the lowest-added-value stage of the process. For example, review rough drafts of reports that you have delegated; don’t wait until your subordinates have spent time polishing them into final form before you find out that you have a basic problem with the contents.”

“In fact, if indicators are put in place, the competitive spirit engendered frequently has an electrifying effect on the motivation each group brings to its work, along with a parallel improvement in performance.”

“The first rule is that a measurement—any measurement—is better than none. But a genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved. Obviously, you measure a salesman by the orders he gets (output), not by the calls he makes (activity).”

“Indicators tend to direct your attention toward what they are monitoring. It is like riding a bicycle: you will probably steer it where you are looking. If, for example, you start measuring your inventory levels carefully, you are likely to take action to drive your inventory levels down, which is good up to a point. But your inventories could become so lean that you can’t react to changes in demand without creating shortages. So because indicators direct one’s activities, you should guard against overreacting. This you can do by pairing indicators, so that together both effect and counter-effect are measured. Thus, in the inventory example, you need to monitor both inventory levels and the incidence of shortages. A rise in the latter will obviously lead you to do things to keep inventories from becoming too low.”

“A common rule we should always try to heed is to detect and fix any problem in a production process at the lowest-value stage possible.”

“All production flows have a basic characteristic: the material becomes more valuable as it moves through the process.”