When you are down and out something always turns up – and it is usually the noses of your friends.
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.
What’s happening now is what happened before, and often what’s going to happen again sometime or other.
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.
Hollywood is Hollywood. There’s nothing you can say about it that isn’t true, good or bad. And if you get into it, you have no right to be bitter – you’re the one who sat down, and joined the game.
The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dream.
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.
The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.
You’re beautful. Yes you are, you’re very very beautiful. Extremely beautiful.
A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.
I have an unfortunate personality.
Paris is the playwright’s delight. New York is the home of directors. London, however, is the actor’s city, the only one in the world. In London, actors are given their head.
A director is someone who presides over a series of accidents.
I love informality. I hate dressing up. I hate to be conventional – and I hate every kind of snob.
I seem to have no dress sense at all. I’m always being listed in New York among one of the ten worst dressed men of the year. Someone once described me as “looking like an unmade bed.” He was right!
I’d make my promises now if I wasn’t so busy arranging to keep them.
I’m a lurid character!
It would be so much better if the critics would come, not on first nights, but on last nights, when they could exercise their undoubted flair for funeral orations.
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.