The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.
A movie studio is the best toy a boy ever had.
I would just like to mention Robert Houdin who in the eighteenth century invented the vanishing birdcage trick and the theater matinee – may he rot and perish. Good afternoon.
I would rather be on the set than doing anything.
If I want to pursue the art of painting – or music or writing or sculpture – it requires only my time and a few dollars for materials. If, however, I want to produce a motion picture I have to go out and raise a million dollars!
I never said I was a genius.
I don’t regard my career as something so precious that it comes before my convictions.
Everybody denies I am a genius – but nobody ever called me one!
I’m extremely surprised to learn that a story, which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding novels and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners.
Personally, I don’t like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she’ll fool her husband, I figure she’ll fool me.
If I had only one film in the world to save, it would be ‘Grand Illusion.’
I drag my myth around with me.
When television came along, I’d already done more than 10 years of radio work and I thought everyone would want me. I sat around waiting for the phone to ring – and it didn’t.
A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows – his own.
In the theater there are 1,500 cameras rolling at the same time – in the cinema, only one.
The basic and essential human is the woman.
Crooks aren’t the worst people, just the stupidest. The fleas of the world.
I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.
The director is the most overrated artist in the world. He is the only artist who, with no talent whatsoever, can be a success for 50 years without his lack of talent ever being discovered.
I’ve always found it very sanitary to be broke.
As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it’s the aspect.