American Director Quotes

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.

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

Cecil B. De Mille

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.

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

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

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

More souls become casualties of war than physical bodies. War is a soul-shattering experience for the innocent.

I was an atheist, finding no reason to postulate the existence of any truths outside of mathematics, physics and chemistry. But then I went to medical school, and encountered life and death issues at the bedsides of my patients. Challenged by one of those patients, who asked "What do you believe, doctor?", I began searching for answers.

Francis Collins

My happiest childhood memories are of times in our backyard. My mother had an old clothesline that hung out in front. It seemed like it stretched a mile long, and I loved sitting in the sun while she hung clothes.

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

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

Andrew Delbanco

Man, I ain't poor. Look, I give away stuff to the Salvation Army. You can't give nothing away to Salvation Army if you poor.

Charles Burnett (director)

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

Oscar Hammerstein II

His heritage, then, had been his indefatigable will; his firm determination to make his way; his great desire to make good.

She painted what she painted because she had to, because she was passionate about it. She didn't care at all if people bought her paintings. As she said, she painted her reality.
I find that I make as an artist the kind of choices that I have to be impassioned about. I'm not going to spend two years on a film or four years on an opera if I don't feel like I can put my own self into it. That doesn't mean it has to be about myself. That's a difference.
Frida painted her own reality, her life. I'm a director and I paint many other people... Other people's realities. But I do have to invest in it.

Writing is all about the preservation of your own voice. So if you give that voice away by guessing what you think and you think and you think as you go, you'll have less to say and then it'll go away completely!

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.

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.

Time marches on and eventually you realize it is marching across your face.

Robert Harling (writer)

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

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

Actors, who should pride themselves on their singularity, are forever trying to be someone else. It isn't necessary for you, the actor, to like yourself— self-love isn't easy to come by for most of us— but you must learn to trust who you are. There is no one else like you.

Michael Shurtleff

We're not gay!
Not that there's anything wrong with that.

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