Trash has given us an appetite for art.
I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
The worst thing about movie-making is that it’s like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
Her only flair is in her nostrils.
What is getting older if it isn’t learning more ways that you’re vulnerable?
Really, it’s not people who don’t understand us who drive us nuts – it’s when those who shouldn’t, do.
It’s sometimes discouraging to see all of a director’s movies, because there’s so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director’s artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he’s a hack.
Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.
Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery.
There is something spurious about the very term ‘a movie made for TV,’ because what you make for TV is a TV program.
For perhaps most Americans, TV is an apppliance, not to be used selectively but to be turned on – there’s always something to watch.
Television represents what happens to a medium when the artists have no power and the businessmen are in full, unquestioned control.
Economy, speed, nervousness, and desperation produce the final wasteful, semi-incoherent movies we see.
Movies have been doing so much of the same thing – in slightly different ways – for so long that few of the possibilities of this great hybrid art have yet been explored.
Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
When I see those ads with the quote ‘You’ll have to see this picture twice,’ I know it’s the kind of picture I don’t want to see once.
At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don’t have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us.
Television as we have it isn’t an art form – it’s a piece of furniture that is good for a few things.
Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.