“When you’re in theater or the circus or film – to me it’s all one – affairs happen. People fall in love.”

Australia, to the rest of the world, is just far away, and Australia in the Thirties was the faraway of the faraway.

Don’t worry about the future.

You really think that on my films people tell me what to do? I don’t think so. On my films I decide.

In the ’80s, everyone wanted to be in opera. It was groovy.

One of my great all-time loves in cinema, and I’ve seen it three times, is Bondarchuk’s ‘War and Peace.’ Not a lot of people may have seen that film. It was made during the Soviet era.

Accept certain inalienable truths.

Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s.

My father made sure that I had lots of levels of education – from ballroom-dancing to painting, commando training, theatre and magic.

I don’t have fights with actors. In absolute honesty, I’ve never fought with any actor ever.

Some of the greatest relationship films of all time, the two stars have hated each other, but mostly you see that chemistry.

To be honest, there is a tourists’ trail; my family had a farm and a gas station, and you can go and see my birthplace, though where I lived is actually under a freeway now.

Hurt him. Hurt him and save him

Trust yourself that you can do it and get it

All good, clean stories are melodrama, it’s just the set of devices that determines how you show or hide it.

I grew up around jazz. I love jazz.

Fitzgerald coined the phrase the ‘Jazz Age,’ and now we’re living in the Hip-Hop Age.

They have similar structure sometimes with the villain, but we can go in any direction we want. If we want to do an episode set in the circus, we can do that. You know how precious that is. That doesn’t come around a lot.

Next to a circus there ain’t nothing that packs up and tears out faster than the Christmas spirit.

Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.

The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles, and mysteries. Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work’ with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.

I treat him [Donald Trump] as an entertainer. I laugh it off. It’s like going to the circus and seeing the acrobats and the dancing bears. He’s willing to say things that are patently false.

The result, I think, is pretty interesting … we don’t expect to make a fortune at it or ever be popular or famous or worshipped or hit The Ed Sullivan Show or the circuses or the big top.

Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus.

I worked the circus, carnival, I had my own medicine show, I worked 18 years of radio.