20th-century Director Quotes

If you're going to be a whore, be a high-priced whore.

I would love to work with Salman. We have a great tuning so if we work together, it will be great fun. But till the time we don't get a good script, a script that excites both of us, we can't work together.

I grew up in the Valley, and I didn't know any of our neighbors. I think when you grow up like that, there's always sort of a fantasy of a place where everybody knew each other, and you had that safe sort of feeling.

Amy Sherman-Palladino

As to the issues on which we part ways with the Committee, I have already stated that our reviews indicate that the detention and interrogation program produced useful intelligence that helped the United States thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives. But let me be clear. We have not concluded that it was the use of EITs (Enhanced interrogation techniques) within that program that allowed us to obtain useful information from detainees subjected to them. The cause and effect relationship between the use of EITs and useful information subsequently provided by the detainee is, in my view, unknowable.

John O. Brennan

Being a journalist, Hacker had no particular talent for reporting facts.

To the playwright Arnold Wesker:

Shut up, Arnold, or I'll direct this play the way you wrote it!

The wonderful thing about films is how they can be understood by so many different people on so many different levels.

Lina Wertmüller

The Hebrew Bible, as a document, displays an astonishing lack of textual self-consciousness. It alleges to know what God thinks, but it does not know itself. It is not aware that it is called the Hebrew Bible. … Jews and Christians have venerated an unself-conscious artifact, one whose embarrassing gaps in self-knowledge have always had to be filled in by later interpreters.

Jacques Berlinerblau

Merely adding up all U.S. forces and comparing them with Soviet Forces, actual or potential, present or future, does not really tell one very much.

Andrew W. Marshall

When God makes a mistake, they call it nature.

I know that theatre people often have a very simplistic view of politics and tend to express very black and white patriotic sentiments but perhaps that is because we know the value of illusion, how it can help strengthen the weak, and stimulate the weary.

Franco Zeffirelli

Creativity is not the domain of one single person. Through free-association of thoughts and brainstorming, an accidental suggestion can be the best solution.

Joshua Fernandez

I think there are three qualities that people believe are weaknesses, but which I believe are strengths, particularly for a filmmaker: paranoia, megalomania and mental contagion.

Laurent Touil-Tartour

We now remain, at least on paper, one of the last few countries in the world, where if you don't die successfully, you'll go to jail for attempting.

I do not say with words. I do not say it with images either.… I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak. That is all I know how to do, but that is my true subject.

I have a very low regard for cynics. I think it's the beginning of dying.

I've had people working for me who are film-school graduates and honestly, if they had been clapper boys or tea boys they probably would have learned more.

My mother, whom I love dearly, has continually revised my life story within the context of a complicated family history that includes more than the usual share of divorce, step-children, dysfunction, and obfuscation. I've spent most of my adult life attempting to deconstruct that history and separate fact from fiction.

Melissa Gilbert

I need your help. The abstruse nature of the subject requires not only concentrated reading, not alone clear understanding, but co-operation with the author. For that which could easily be made comprehensible by personal contact and demonstration, must of necessity depend on mere words and intellectual concepts. Many of the questions that may arise in your mind during or after reading of each chapter can best be answered through the practical application of the exercises prescribed herein. Unfortunately, there is no other way to co-operate: the technique of acting can never be properly understood without practicing it.

Michael Chekhov

I don't 'ave a future. Nobody 'as a future. The party's over. Take a look around you, man. It's all breakin' up.

I think that Man in creating God somewhat overestimated his abilities.

Johannes Grenzfurthner

I always felt the world cannot fall apart as long as free men see the rainbow, feel the rain and hear the laugh of a child.

I am trisexual. The Army, the Navy, and the Household Cavalry.

Brian Desmond Hurst

I learned long ago to accept the fact that not everything I create will see the light of day.

"Republic" is one of those words that makes me tight in the throat. Same tightness a man gets when his baby makes his first step, or his boy first shaves, makes his first sound like a man. Some words can give you a feeling that makes your heart warm. "Republic" is one of those words.

James Edward Grant