“What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out.”

We cannot hope to scale great moral heights by ignoring petty obligations.

For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.

Wit is artificial; humor is natural. Wit is accidental; humor is inevitable. Wit is born of conscious effort; humor, of the allotted ironies of fate. Wit can be expressed only in language; humor can be developed sufficiently in situation.

In the stress of modern life, how little room is left for that most comfortable vanity that whispers in our ears that failures are not faults! Now we are taught from infancy that we must rise or fall upon our own merits; that vigilance wins success, and incapacity means ruin

Friendship takes time.

We have but the memories of past good cheer, we have but the echoes of departed laughter. In vain we look and listen for the mirth that has died away. In vain we seek to question the gray ghosts of old-time revelers.

We cannot learn to love other tourists,-the laws of nature forbid it,-but, meditating soberly on the impossibility of their loving us, we may reach some common platform of tolerance, some common exchange of recognition and amenity.

If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes.

I do strive to think well of my fellow man, but no amount of striving can give me confidence in the wisdom of a congressional vote.

An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.

Life is so full of miseries, minor and major; they press so close upon us at every step of the way, that it is hardly worthwhile to call one another’s attention to their presence.

The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other.

There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the joke we do not see.

Economics and ethics have little in common.

The pitfall of the feminist is the belief that the interests of men and women can ever be severed; that what brings sufferings to the one can leave the other unscathed.

A real dog, beloved and therefore pampered by his mistress, is a lamentable spectacle. He suffers from fatty degeneration of his moral being.

There was a sense of future that was the result of the mixture of politics, cinema, music, the first joints. And the movies were a very important part of that cocktail.

American cinema is international like the fairy tales were international.

For example, Jewish directors coming from Germany or Austria and enriching Hollywood. In 15, 20 years, Hollywood became imperialistic. Cinema goes ahead when it is marriaged by other culture. Otherwise, it turns on itself.

I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. ‘The Dreamers’ was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.

I was seduced by the nouvelle vague, because it was really reinventing everything. And the Italian cinema that one would see in the theaters in the late ’50s, early ’60s was Italian comedy, Italian style, which, to me, was like the end of neo-realism.

I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language.

In cinema, the leading player is the director.

The movies I like are always movies where cinema is reinvented like if it was the beginning of cinema.