Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant.
Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.
I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.
There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.
On my tombstone, I want written: 'He never did 'Love Boat!'
In common with all Protestant or Jewish cultures, America was developed on the idea that your word is your bond. Otherwise, the frontier could never have been opened, 'cause it was lawless. A man's word had to mean something.
I don't pray because I don't want to bore God.
When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.
I've always found it very sanitary to be broke.
'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.
A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
I'm never certain of a performance - my own or the other actors' - or the script or anything... But to me it seems there's only one place in the world the camera can be, and the decision usually comes immediately.
If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.
Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.
There were centuries when civilization had no theater.
I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom.
Now I'm an old Christmas tree, the roots of which have died. They just come along and while the little needles fall off me replace them with medallions.
The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.
The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.
Film is like a colony and there are very few colonists.
