“I have a perfect cure for a sore throat: cut it.”

I have a feeling that inside you somewhere, there’s somebody nobody knows about.

Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.

I’m not against the police; I’m just afraid of them.

I can’t read fiction without visualizing every scene. The result is it becomes a series of pictures rather than a book.

In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

Reality is something that none of us can stand, at any time.

A woman who spends all day washing and cooking and ironing doesn’t want to go to the movies to watch a film about a woman who spends all day washing and cooking and ironing.

If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book – it makes a very poor doorstop.

One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedly, as in life.

The picture’s over. Now I have to go and put it on film.

To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script and the script.

Really, the novelist has the best casting since he doesn’t have to cope with the actors and all the rest.

In the old days villains had moustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don’t want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings.

I enjoy playing the audience like a piano.

I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.

Yeah, the cut throats and the pigs. But who wants all that blood spilled, judge, huh?

And then you go back like a few days later and then you listen to the movie. And it sort of plays in your mind like a film, like a first rough cut of a movie.

There are probably a few library fines I haven’t paid yet, but I’m a pretty clean-cut guy overall.

It’s very evocative; it’s like a first cut because you hear ‘She walked to the door,’ and you visualize all these things. ‘She opens the door’ . . . because you read the stage directions, too.

A lot of actors choose parts by the scripts, but I don’t trust reading the scripts that much.

Francis Ford Coppola did this early on. You tape a movie, like a radio show, and you have the narrator read all the stage directions.

I ask the American people not to fall victim to disinformation. There are no death panels. The Affordable Care Act cuts the deficit.

It is a voice that cuts you like a razor, but you can still hear the innocence in it, a claim to purity that soars out of the garbage of her throat, carrying evil harmonies.