American Director Quotes

Orson Welles

Martin Scorsese

Steven Spielberg

Clint Eastwood

Quentin Tarantino

Jack Nicholson

Francis Ford Coppola

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

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

Martin Scorsese

One's lifework... grows with the working and the living. Do it as if your life depended on it, and the first thing you know, you'll have made a life of it.

Theresa Helburn

What we've got here is failure to communicate.

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

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.

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.

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

To the World, the World we show
We make the World to laugh
And teach each Hemisphere to know
How lives the Other Half.

Lyman Hakes Howe

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

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.

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

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

We don't torture people. Let me say that again to you. We don't torture people, OK.

When one is undone—sprawled across the cold tile of a public bathroom in a pool of one's own vomit, or shivering in the back of a taxi in a pair of urine-soaked skinny jeans with no money for cab fare and a dead cell phone battery—much like a wobbly toddler or an unhinged politician, one immediately looks for someone else to blame. God. Your parents. Ex-girlfriends. Undocumented immigrants. Marvin in Human Resources. China.

Striker: Surely you can't be serious.
Dr Rumack: I am serious. And don't call me Shirley.

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.

Now, public libraries are most admirable institutions, but they have one irritating custom. They want their books back.

Cecil B. De Mille

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

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

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

Steve Gordon (director)

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.