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.
I don’t want any description of me to be accurate; I want it to be flattering. I don’t think people who have to sing for their supper ever like to be described truthfully – not in print anyway. We need to sell tickets, so we need good reviews.
I discovered at the age of six that everything was a phony, worked with mirrors. Since then, I’ve always wanted to be a magician.
Hollywood is a gold-plated suburb suitable for golfers, gardeners, assorted middlemen, and contented movies stars. I am none of these things.
Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of failure with a death in it. But there is more lost paradise in them than defeat.
By nature, I am an experimentalist. I don’t believe much in accomplishment.
Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me.
Criticism is the essence of creation.
Every true artist must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan.
Friendship creates only the illusion of not being alone.
Hollywood expects you to experiment but on a film that makes money and if you don’t make money, you’re to blame. Your job is to make money.
There are a thousand ways of playing a good classic. If it were effective, I would play Hamlet on a trapeze.
You could write all the IDEAS of all the movies, my own included, on the head of a pin.
I love moving around from town to town. I never got on a train in my life without my spirits rising.