20th-century Director Quotes

Alfred Hitchcock

Orson Welles

Martin Scorsese

Steven Spielberg

Federico Fellini

Clint Eastwood

Laurence Olivier

I'm not videotaping my life, but in a way I am trying to put certain things about myself on canvas.

Martin Scorsese

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.

Lee's great gifts are teaching and inspirational guidance, not administration and management.

Cheryl Crawford

Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?

Alfred Hitchcock

When your time is up, your time is up, and you've just got to pray to God that you've done something worthwhile with your life.

Here's the first major lesson: Writing is not an activity. It's not something you sit down at the keyboard, and just start doing. That's called 'typing.' Typing is an activity... Writing is a process. And if you start thinking of it as a process, life gets so much easier.

When anything becomes the fashion, that's the time to put a bomb under it.

Joan Littlewood

I've always maintained that it's easy to make a film on Adolf Hitler. What is difficult is to find out why he struck a chord with the German people; what is the nature of fear, aspiration and identity that he evoked in them that it became Hitler's Germany.

Saeed Akhtar Mirza

Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write -Tough and Competent- on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.

Eugene F. Kranz

The world is made for people who aren't cursed with self-awareness.

If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it's that everyone can be killed.

Francis Ford Coppola

I have no publicist, no agent, no manager, no lawyer, no assistant, no helper, no stylist, no intern, no maid, no gardener, nothing. Oh, I have a dentist. I had a shrink but he died 9 years ago, right when I needed him most.

Arthur: I think I'll take a bath.
Hobson: I'll alert the media.

Steve Gordon (director)

For me, self-discipline has never corresponded to a voluntary adhesion to norms invented by others. It has always been the first step towards breaking the chains.

Acting in Star Wars, I felt like a raisin in a gigantic fruit salad, and I didn't even know who the cantaloupes were.

This is the city. Los Angeles, California. I work here. I carry a badge. My name's Friday. The story you are about to see is true; the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country...we did not, in fact, come to the United States at all. The United States came to us.

Everything was in neon lights six feet tall: LUST, REVENGE, SEX.

Of the films of Cecil B. de mille

Mitchell Leisen

I often sit back and think 'I wish I'd done that' and find out later that I already have.

Good-looking people, they got no spine; their art never lasts. They get the girls, but we're smarter.... The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool.

My favorite review described me as the cinematic equivalent of junk mail.

Since science is fashionable today, it allows its fraternity to propose cloddish monstrosities as a solution to man's problems in many fields. Fashion rules and, anyway, who but the experts can even dare to speak up?

Frank Schaeffer

I think of the classical world as a cancer patient or an AIDS patient. You know you have a limited life span. The question you now might want to ask is what would be the most important things to do now with your remaining years. I would like to think that that type of prioritizing could happen with museums, symphony orchestras, opera companies. Things really are urgent right now, and what we're doing somehow has to matter, has to make a contribution.

So we might say that the most important thing one can acquire in college is a well-functioning bullshit meter.

Andrew Delbanco