A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.
Have you ever had a single moment’s thought about my responsibilities?
Private Joker is silly and he’s ignorant but he’s got guts and guts is enough.
You know, I often thought that the gangster and the artist are the same in the eyes of the masses. They’re admired and hero-worshipped but there is always present underlying desire to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory.
All my life I’ve always spoiled the things that meant the most to me.
Don’t do anything. Just tolerate me and let me suffer, knowing how you feel.
I’m not afraid of dying tomorrow, only of being killed.
The lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have.
You’re constantly changing man. But the film’s not changing. The film stays the same. That’s the beautiful aspect of it.
Regret isn’t going to get me anywhere. It’s like being obsessed with something. It doesn’t bring you anywhere.
I used and abused drugs and alcohol. When I stopped doing that it became a lot clearer that life goes from inside to giving as opposed to taking and destroying.
I’m a slave to my imagination in terms of making narrative films.
A film needs more than you can give it in a lifetime.
If you really want to communicate something, even if it’s just an emotion or an attitude, let alone an idea, the least effective and least enjoyable way is directly. It only goes in about an inch. But if you can get people to the point where they have to think a moment what it is you’re getting at, and then discover it, the thrill of discovery goes right through the heart.
Never, ever go near power. Don’t become friends with anyone who has real power. It’s dangerous.
You know, Michael, it’s not absolutely true in every case that nobody likes a smart ass.
People react primarily to direct experience and not to abstractions; it is very rare to find anyone who can become emotionally involved with an abstraction. The longer the bomb is around without anything happening, the better the job that people do in psychologically denying its existence. It has become as abstract as the fact that we are all going to die someday, which we usually do an excellent job of denying.
I have a wife, three children, three dogs, seven cats. I’m not a Franz Kafka, sitting alone and suffering.
Barry was born clever enough at gaining a fortune, but incapable of keeping one. For the qualities and energies which lead a man to achieve the first are often the very cause of his ruin in the latter case.
If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility.
Man isn’t a noble savage, he’s an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved – that about sums it up. I’m interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it’s a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.