“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.”

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.

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.

Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.

I can think of nothing that an audience won’t understand. The only problem is to interest them; once they are interested, they understand anything in the world.

Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy.

I seem to have no dress sense at all. I’m always being listed in New York among one of the ten worst dressed men of the year. Someone once described me as “looking like an unmade bed.” He was right!

I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.