“Crooks aren’t the worst people, just the stupidest. The fleas of the world.”

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.

When you are down and out something always turns up – and it is usually the noses of your friends.

I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment.

I dont believe in learning from other peoples pictures. I think you should learn from your own interior vision of things and discover, as I say, Innocently, as though there had never been anybody.

Some people seek to understand, and some people seek to portray what they want to portray.

It is a rare and beautiful thing when we choose to offer love in situations when most people would choose to scorn or ignore.

Traveling around in a little tin box isolates one from the people and the atmosphere of the place in a way that I have never experienced before.

There is a world up ahead where people are not targeted for beliefs or bodies, where peace isn’t a fantasy but reality. Build the world you hope your children will see.

I only want my work to make people happy.

It’s funny how most people love the dead, once you’re dead your made for life.

I don’t like being completely isolated. I need the energy from other people.

It seems there’s always another rumor about my life; some people are simply talked about more than others.