“If there’s anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it’s being taken too seriously.”

I, you know, am all over the place – every category of pictures I have made, good, bad or indifferent.

If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.

I am appalled by this Marilyn Monroe cult. Perhaps it’s getting to be an act of courage to say the truth about her. Well, let me be courageous.

It was a hot afternoon and I can still remember the smell of honeysuckle all along the street. How can I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?

Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.

I just always think, ‘Do I like it?’ And if I like it, maybe other people will come and like it too.

One’s too many and a hundred’s not enough.

After so many drive-in waitresses becoming movie stars, there has been this real drought, when along come class; somebody who actually went to school, can spell, maybe even plays the piano.

The best director is the one you don’t see.

She may be a wispy, thin little thing, but when you see that girl, you know you’re really in the presence of something. In that league there’s only ever been Garbo, and the other Hepburn, and maybe Bergman. It’s a rare quality, but boy, do you know when you’ve found it.

Well, nobody’s perfect.

I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.

Jerry: Oh, you don’t understand, Osgood! Ehhhh… I’m a man. Osgood: Well, nobody’s perfect.

We’re making a picture for middle-class people, the people that you see on the subway, or the people that you see in a restaurant. Just normal people.

I’m delighted with it, because it used to be that films were the lowest form of art. Now we’ve got something to look down on.

You know, that stuff about pink elephants, that’s the bunk. It’s little animals. Little tiny turkeys in straw hats. Midget monkeys coming through the keyholes.

When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously.

The Welfare State, South Africa – and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

They’re not concerned with it. They don’t take their musical legacy seriously.

Spending a weekend with Hitler would have been boring in the extreme, although you would have had a greater certainty in coming back alive.

It doesn’t mean we don’t take it seriously, but no one is under the delusion (that we’re) bringing world peace.

When people are coming to Krakow and we show them how and where we practice, they are like, ‘Seriously?

I figure if I take my children’s work seriously, maybe they will too. And it reinforces the idea that art is not something alien and esoteric. Anyone can make art.

It’s great when people appreciate your work, but I don’t know how seriously to take it.