“A movie in production is the greatest train set a boy could ever have.”

I’ve spent most of my mature life trying to prove that I’m not irresponsible.

The Godfather’ was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.

If I ever own a restaurant, I will never allow the waiters to ask if the diners like their dishes. Particularly when they’re talking.

My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.

A director is someone who presides over a series of accidents.

I’m one of those fellows so frightened of driving that I go 80 miles an hour – and the more frightened I get, the faster I go.

The director is the most overrated artist in the world. He is the only artist who, with no talent whatsoever, can be a success for 50 years without his lack of talent ever being discovered.

The most personal thing I’ve put in [Touch of Evil] is my hatred of the abuse of police power. It’s better to see a murderer go free than for a policeman to abuse his power.

The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.

Every true artist must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan.

I have made an art form of the interview. The French are the best interviewers, despite their addiction to the triad, like all Cartesians.

Paris is the playwright’s delight. New York is the home of directors. London, however, is the actor’s city, the only one in the world. In London, actors are given their head.

Hollywood is Hollywood. There’s nothing you can say about it that isn’t true, good or bad. And if you get into it, you have no right to be bitter — you’re the one who sat down, and joined the game.

Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in senate.

A man’s hatred is always concentrated upon that which makes him conscious of his bad qualities.

The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, has no style at all. He lives only in what is.

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

Every man thinks God is on his side.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.