Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm not a drinker, my body won't tolerate...eh...spirits, really. I had two martinis New Years Eve and I tried to hi-jack an elevator and fly it to Cuba.
Some women feel power is important, some women feel that looks are important, tenderness, intelligence...but sense of humor seems to permeate all of them.
There's no point in looking back, because there's nothing you can really do to improve the film. You can only aggravate and wish you had done stuff better.
I wouldn't necessarily want to be a big muscular guy. It's nice to be gorgeous whether you're male or female assuming you don't lose whatever else you have.
The French make two mistakes about me. They think I'm an intellectual because I wear these glasses and they think I'm an artist because my films lose money.
To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer. Not to love is to suffer.
Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.
I came home one night, some month ago, and I went to the closet in my bedroom...and a moth ate my sports jacket. He was laying on the floor, nauseous, y'know.
I don't rely on anybody except my own judgment. I don't get much input. I don't know if that's helped me or if I would be better off if I did rely on someone.
When I first started, there were writers that I looked up to that I felt very influenced by and very respectful toward their work and their opinion of my work.
People make films for different reasons. For money. Or, they make them because something in them demands artistic expression. I do it because I enjoy the work.
As I got more confident, I was able to let actors improvise, and do long takes. It's 10%, 5% you learn and experience. The rest you just have or you don't have.
I think Frank Capra was a much craftier filmmaker, a wonderful filmmaker. He had enormous technique, and he knew how to manipulate the public quite brilliantly.
People always tease me. They say, look at you, you went for so much psychoanalysis and you're so neurotic, you wind up marrying a girl so much younger than you.
Spencer was searching for a woman interested in gold, inorganic chemistry, outdoor sex and the music of Bach. In short, he was looking for himself, only female.
Another good thing about being poor is that when you are seventy your children will not have you declared legally insane in order to gain control of your estate.
She had been critical of his new torch song, "A Side Order of Heartache, Please," suggesting it could be used as a good way to break in their new paper shredder.
The less I speak to the actors, the better. And I always hire great people, and I don't want to impose my pre-conceived notions on them. They know how to play it.
I never have an alter ego in the movies. That's a fiction that the press has made up over the years, and it's fun to write that. It gives them something to write.
Every time you make a movie it's a new and different experience. You learn very little from the past. So, I'm a little bit better than I was when I first started.
I have great faith in the actors. When they improvise, it always sounds better than the stuff I write in my bedroom. When they improvise, they make it sound alive.
I have a great admiration for English actors and actresses and have used them at every opportunity over the years, but now I won't have to import them to New York.
I did not marry the first girl that I fell in love with, because there was a tremendous religious conflict, at the time. She was an atheist, and I was an agnostic.
Oh, he was probably a member of the National Rifle Association. It was a group that helped criminals get guns so they could shoot citizens. It was a public service.
When one chooses to be a writer, psychologically there's a reason for that because you like the isolation and you like to be by yourself and you are by nature timid.
What I do know about physics is that to a man standing on the shore, time passes quicker than to a man on a boat - especially if the man on the boat is with his wife.
I spend a lot of time idly. I go to sporting events, play my clarinet. I practise. But if you work every day, a certain amount on a steady basis, the work accumulates.
When we lose twenty pounds... we may be losing the twenty best pounds we have! We may be losing the pounds that contain our genius, our humanity, our love and honesty.
How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not "the thing with feathers." The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.
I took a puff of the wrong cigarette at a fraternity dance once, and the cops had to get me, y'know. I broke two teeth trying to give a hickie to the Statue of Liberty.
For a while we pondered whether to take a vacation or get a divorce. We decided that a trip to Bermuda is over in two weeks, but a divorce is something you always have.
You know what my philosophy of life is? That it’s important to have some laughs, but you got to suffer a little too, because otherwise you miss the whole point to life.
I've had a very productive life. I've worked very hard, I've never fallen prey to depression. I'm not sure I could have done all of that without being in psychoanalysis.
Life is full of moments that are good - winning a lottery, seeing a beautiful woman, a great dinner - but the whole thing is tragic. It's an oasis that is very pleasant.
This sounds so bleak when I say it, but we need some delusions to keep us going. And the people who successfully delude themselves seem happier than the people who can't.
I think I've gotten technically better over the years but you'd have to be a fool not to. I've made so many movies that by sheer quantity you get better at the technique.
A fast word about oral contraception. I was involved in an extremely good example of oral contraception two weeks ago. I asked a girl to go to bed with me, she said 'no'.
Ads answered out of desperation in the New York Review of Books proved equally futile as…the 'Bay Area Bisexual' told me I didn't quite coincide with either of her desires.
I've always believed that thoughtful people don't really take the tabloids seriously. They're basically a form of entertainment. I enjoy them as much as the next New Yorker.
It is clear the future holds great opportunities. It also holds pitfalls. The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o'clock.
Don't you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here.
Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought-particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things.
To me nature is... spiders and bugs, and big fish eating little fish, and plants eating plans, and animals eating... It's like an enormous restaurant, that's the way I see it.
My experience creatively is different than my experience in life, for, as my father would say, the simple reason that you can't get hurt when everything goes wrong creatively.
Writing is great because in the writing you never have to... First of all you never have to leave your home. And you never have to meet the test of reality when you're writing.
I was raised in the Jewish tradition, taught never to marry a Gentile woman, shave on a Saturday night and, most especially, never to shave a Gentile woman on a Saturday night.
When I was young, I wanted to be a dramatic writer, a writer of tragedy. Nothing would've pleased me more than if I could have written like Eugene O'Neil or Tennessee Williams.
I never wanted to or expected to make a film outside of New York. New York became very, very expensive. The same $18 million spent in Barcelona or Rome goes much further there.
We knew the front door was always left open, but we broke in just to keep in practice. Doxy turned all the Washburn family photos to the wall so there wouldn't be any witnesses.
I wish my parents had raised me in Manhattan because I think it's the greatest thing you can do for a kid is to raise them in New York City. I can see this with my own children.