France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can’t tear the toilet paper.
Don’t be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also.
The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
Hollywood didn’t kill Marilyn Monroe, it’s the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
Well, nobody’s perfect.
Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.
If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?
The forest of Compiegne. Look at it. Like a kind grandmother dozing in her rocking chair. Old trees practicing curtsies in the wind because they still think Louis XIV is king.
They’ve tried to manufacture other Marilyn Monroes and they will undoubtedly keep trying. But it won’t work. She was an original.
An actor entering through the door, you’ve got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you’ve got a situation.
What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.
Marilyn was mean. Terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever met around this town. I have never met anybody as mean as Marilyn Monroe or as utterly fabulous on the screen.
The ultimate trick is to convince, persuade. Every single person out there is an idiot, but collectively they’re a genius.
It was a hot afternoon and I can still remember the smell of honeysuckle all along the street. How can I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?
A bad play folds and is forgotten, but in pictures we don’t bury our dead. When you think it’s out of your system, your daughter sees it on television and says, My father is an idiot.
The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.
I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.
Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
I’ve met a lot of hardboiled eggs in my time, but you’re twenty minutes.
One’s too many and a hundred’s not enough.