Director Quotes

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

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

Steve Gordon (director)

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

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

My best friend Linda is leaving her husband just because he is unfaithful to her. That is no reason to leave the person. I feel like after that, you should stay with them and make sure that the rest of their life is sheer hell.

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

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

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

Letting go of someone we love is the hardest thing we will ever do. Some people never surrender to love for the fear of being hurt. But to not have loved, to not have felt the immense joy it brings, would have been a far worse kind of death.

Am I not a man? And is not a man stupid? I'm a man, so I married. Wife, children, house, everything, the full catastrophe.

Michael Cacoyannis

If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it's that everyone can be killed.

Francis Ford Coppola

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

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

We haven't come close to figuring out how to use all these new-media opportunities, and most clients are very conflicted about what media they should use, why and how. They keep thinking there's some new silver bullet in the new-media world that will allow them to save money or find a new way to twist consumers' arms.

I think my mother was like a small company which, because things are not ship-shape, keeps two sets of books, one for the auditors and then there's the other one.

Michael Lindsay-Hogg

Listen. This will probably be the worst pain you have ever experienced in your life. Everything in your body will tell you to let go, but you have to hold on. You have to hold on, Maddy, no matter what. No matter how badly it hurts. You can never, never let go. Can you do that for me?

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.

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

Philip Dunne (writer)

"Republic" is one of those words that makes me tight in the throat. Same tightness a man gets when his baby makes his first step, or his boy first shaves, makes his first sound like a man. Some words can give you a feeling that makes your heart warm. "Republic" is one of those words.

James Edward Grant

What we've got here is failure to communicate.

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

To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.

There are some things which cannot be learned, though they can be studied. Among them are the laws of art—and the lawlessness of it, as well.

Josef von Sternberg

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

Marcello Marchesi

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