“I’m never certain of a performance – my own or the other actors’ – or the script or anything. But to me it seems there’s only one place in the world the camera can be, and the decision usually comes immediately.”

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

Create your own visual style. Let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.

At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

I prefer people who rock the boat to people who jump out.

I hate women, hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never really learns anything about them. They are inscrutable.

Race hate isn’t human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.

I don’t say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.

I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don’t think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.

Never expect justice in this world. That is not part of God’s plan. Everybody thinks that if they don’t get it, they’re some kind of odd man out. And it’s not true. Nobody gets justice – people just get good luck or bad luck.

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

Friendship creates only the illusion of not being alone.

See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike. I’m profoundly convinced that that’s a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. Bosnians have short necks.

An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be.

Criticism is the essence of creation.

Hollywood is a gold-plated suburb suitable for golfers, gardeners, assorted middlemen, and contented movies stars. I am none of these things.

Method actors are like hams.

If there is something magic about the collaborations I have with actors it’s because I put the character first.

Only a madman or an actor would want to be President of the United States.

I didn’t want to be an actress; I never thought of being an actress because, as children, there were three of us – I was the middle child – and we spent our time in church from Sunday morning to Saturday night.

My parents said, Oh, he’s going to be a director someday. I wanted to be an actor.

My experience of singing, as an actor, was that there’s a different creative feeling of freedom. The acting thing is a bit more defined and cerebral. I can see why people would want to cross over. If you have so much freedom on stage then perhaps you want to be confined a bit, and vice versa.

In my early years, there were a number of experiences that made me decide I could not afford the luxury of just being an actress. There were a number of issues I wanted to address. And I wanted to use my career as a platform.

When I told my mother that I wanted to be an actress, she said, you can’t live here and do that, and so I moved out. I was determined to prove her wrong because she was so sure that I was going to go astray. And that’s the juice that kept me going.