American Director Quotes

Orson Welles

Martin Scorsese

Steven Spielberg

Clint Eastwood

Quentin Tarantino

Jack Nicholson

Francis Ford Coppola

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

Cheryl Crawford

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.

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

Martin Scorsese

If you expect nothing, you can never be disappointed. Apart from a few starry-eyed poets or monks living on a mountaintop somewhere, however, we all have expectations. We not only have them, we need them. They fuel our dreams, our hopes, and our lives like some super-caffeinated energy drink.

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

Very few people have a lot of time to dedicate to one hobby. I was fortunate to have started so young, because when you're young you have nothing but time. Hours and hours to burn up on something as silly as a movie.

Robert Rodriguez

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.

There are three stages of an actor's career. Young, old, and "You look good".

The thing that I'm just scared to death of is that someday I'm going to wake up and bore somebody with a film.

Steven Spielberg

Book-to-screen adaptations must always strive for two things: First, you must find a way to tell the broad story of the original plot; second, you must somehow reflect the spirit and texture of the novel—that is, you must transform a lot of words into a few pictures.

Tommy Lee Wallace

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

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

Of the films of Cecil B. de mille

Mitchell Leisen

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

Come to think of it, Pasadena's as good a place to die as any.

The internet is not necessarily a golden goose yet, but we must fight to keep it safe, keep it level, keep it democratic, keep it open, keep it diverse so that when it becomes the golden goose, we independent artists can share and maybe at least get a wing or a thigh, even if we don't get the breast meat.

When she's narrow, she's narrow as an arrow
And she's broad, where a broad, should be broad.

Oscar Hammerstein II

You know what intimacy is? It's into-me-you-see... it's allowing someone to know who you are when you have all these defenses to keep them from knowing.

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.

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

Cecil B. De Mille

It is a shame to take this country away from the rattlesnakes.

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

Andrew Delbanco

The interesting part about making these films is that it's half directing, and half really being a leader, because you have such little time to shoot such a big concept. It's really like a war against time, and your crew is your platoon. You're going as hard and as fast as you can to try to get everything on screen.

I'll make it. I won't die. I've got too much I have to do to let myself die.

The history of each and every territory is written in the blood of those who died trying to fulfill the aspirations of their ambitious leaders.

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