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

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.

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.

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.

A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.

I am not going to be dictated to by the size of the camera. I use everything from an 8 x 10 to a 35-mm. But I don’t use these modern cameras which break down all the time !

We’ve spent now about 150 years trying to convince ourselves that photographs are reliable evidence, some unimpeachable slice of the real world. That was a myth from the very beginning.

And I don’t like having my picture taken. I’m almost like an old African in that sense. I think it steals a bit of the soul.

When I got cast in ‘Rocky IV,’ I had never seen a film camera before. And here I was in this boxing movie.

All the films are hits before you turn the camera on. It’s only in the execution that they fail. I’ve been less than happy with the way a couple of films were edited, but it’s a director’s prerogative and you gotta go with it.

I treat the camera like a person – I gaze into it. Photos are a flat thing, and you need to put life into them.

I think a lot of people like hidden-camera shows where they think they’re spying on somebody who doesn’t know they’re looking at them. And nobody takes it seriously – you either enjoy it and get a laugh out of the reactions or not.