Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm anything but confident.
Any good movie is filled with secrets.
The only safe thing is to take a chance.
Comedy is brutal. It's powerful, though.
The unconscious is our best collaborator.
For a director, a musical is a special kind of hell.
Everybody wants to be known. Everybody's a Kardashian.
The only safe thing in filmmaking is to take a chance.
Fear of comedy is all so much about who you do it with.
A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.
People, by and large, would rather be talking than listening.
Limitations are inspiring: they lead to thinking, so I don't mind them.
I have never understood people dividing things into dramas and comedies.
'Catch-22' was a nightmare to make, and everybody was unhappy except me.
I love the editing process of making movies. I just wish that life had one.
There's nothing in the American dream about character. It's a serious flaw.
Being with an insanely jealous person is like being in the room with a dead mammoth.
I came to love silence, because it's so rare, and it's now my favorite aural condition.
I'm in the theater because of two plays: 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and 'Death of a Salesman.'
It's not a filmmaker's job to explain his technique but to tell his story the best way he can.
Very often when a story really holds us, it gets pushed away because it's too close for comfort.
In a weird way, when I was looking back, I didn't know I was going to be a director until I was.
It's not a film-maker's job to explain his technique, but to tell his story the best way he can.
Most great plays of the past lose their grip on immediacy; on application to our lives right now.
I'm an enormous fan of 'The West Wing.' It was one of the very few shows I would watch every week.
I think that to make something alive, instead of on a page, is an honorable task. And it turns me on.
The things that you saw earlier in your life generally have more power than the things you saw last week.
I think the main thing about comedy and humor is that it's impossible and always was impossible to define.
Nerves provide me with energy... It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that's when I get worried.
You want to make money, remake 'Cinderella.' You want to move people, remake the Hippolytus and Phaedra myth.
I still think that luck is what a lot of the good things come from. It's simply the luck of where you are, when.
Clay Aiken is amazing beyond that glorious voice. Turns out he is an excellent comic actor and a master of character.
There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do. It’s like falling in love.
There's nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you're meant to do. It's like falling in love.
I don't know that a political climate - as long as it's still a free country - makes much difference in the film world.
Chicago is not a very fashion-driven place. Nobody says, 'Oh, you've got to come see these fabulous people!' Nobody cares.
The reason you do this stuff - comedy, plays, movies - is to be seized by something, to disappear in the service of an idea.
I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That’s the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.
I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That's the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.
The whole point about laughter is it's like mercury: you can't catch it, you can't catch what motivates it - that's why it's funny.
If you lose a parent, it never goes away. As a kid, I dreamed about my father coming back for 15 or 20 years. I still do sometimes.
Yes. The whole point about laughter is it's like mercury: you can't catch it, you can't catch what motivates it - that's why it's funny.
That seems to me the great American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.
I was just trying to make a nice little movie... It wasn't until I saw it all put together that I realized this was something remarkable.
I believed early and still believe that everybody who can act can do it already, just they don't know how and don't want to talk about it.
That seems to me the greatest American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.
Oh my God, if I know anything, I know I'm gonna die! I never forget that. I know I'll be forgotten in a minute, and that's just fine with me.
I asked a shrink: 'Everything is so great. Why am I still so angry?' He said, 'Anger doesn't go away.' I always thought it was kind of a good engine.
Technically, maybe I learned most of all from George Stevens, and among his movies I learned the most from 'A Place in the Sun.' It's a lesson in moviemaking.
Plays, especially great plays, yield their secrets over a long period of time. You can't read it three times and say, 'OK, I got it. I know what's happening.'