20th-century Director Quotes

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.

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

Andrew Delbanco

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.

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

But what if it turns out, as it just possibly might, that William Shakespeare of Stratford was not the author of the plays ascribed to him? There is a theory, advanced by reputable scholars, seriously and, in my opinion, plausibly, that Shakespeare merely lent his name as a cover for the literary activities of another person, perhaps the Earl of Oxford. If, by some terrible chance, this theory should be proved, then straightway Stratford's tourist business would dwindle. It would become just one more, and honestly not one in the first ten, of England's picturesque small towns.

A gym for the soul is a place where personal investment is required and the return is real.

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.

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.

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

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

Of the films of Cecil B. de mille

Mitchell Leisen

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.

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

God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages.

We may pretend that we're basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.

I am that twentieth-century failure, a happy undersexed celibate.

What we've got here is failure to communicate.

Christian said he'd call the next day, but in boy time that meant Thursday.