Director Quotes

Alfred Hitchcock

Orson Welles

Martin Scorsese

Steven Spielberg

Federico Fellini

Clint Eastwood

Laurence Olivier

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

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

Cheryl Crawford

Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?

Alfred Hitchcock

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

Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera.

Jean-Luc Godard

Never 'eld with mournin' meself. I always say, life's black enough as it is without dressin' in it, too.

Philip Dunne (writer)

I could be just a writer very easily. I am not a writer. I am a screenwriter, which is half a film-maker... But it is not an art form, because screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.

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

Films don't cause violence, people do. Violence defines our existence. To shield oneself is more dangerous than trying to reflect it.

Kathryn Bigelow

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

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Lewis Allen (director)

Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.

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

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.

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.

The direct effect on our mind is achieved by the words, the text, the thought, which arouse consideration. Our will is directly affected by the super-objective, by other objectives, by a through line of action. Our feelings are directly worked upon by tempo-rhythm.

Konstantin Stanislavski

In 16th-century Italy there lived Lodovico Gonzaga, a 16-year old seminarist who was very fond of playing ball. Once a certain priest passing by wondered if for a future priest the youth was too keen on his pursuit and asked him: "What would you do if you learned that in half an hour the end of the world was coming?" To which Lodovico replied: "I'd play on." According to the Russian thinker Georgy Fedotov, the importance of culture lies in precisely that: we go on playing ball on the verge of Doomsday...

Vladimir Barsky

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

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

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

Human needs to go through the abyss of pains and loss, because the more we suffer-the better.

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.

Voltaire was witty because he drank coffee. A conventional liquid stimulant.

Marcello Marchesi

The more time you have to think things through, the more you have to screw it up.