“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.”

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.

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.

I hate that word. It’s return–a return to the millions of people who’ve never forgiven me for deserting the screen.

I have never met anyone as utterly mean as Marilyn Monroe. Nor as utterly fabulous on the screen, and that includes Garbo.

The forest of Compiegne. Look at it. Like a kind grandmother dozing in her rocking chair. Old trees practicing curtsies in the wind because they still think Louis XIV is king.

God save me from myself.

The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.

You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.

The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.

A society without a middle class is a society primed for explosion.

The middle way is an invitation to leap beyond nirvana and samsara and to realize the unborn Buddha mind right in the middle of everywhere.

The Buddha’s insight into the middle way is not simply about a balance between extremes. This conventional understanding misses the deeper revelation of the middle way as being the very nature of unexcelled enlightenment.

Who that has plodded on to middle age would take back upon his shoulders ten of the vanished years, with their mingled pleasures and pains? Who would return to the youth he is forever pretending to regret?

Real management is developing people through work.

I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class.

Gabriel Levin’s book is a journey through time and through entrenched animosities of the Middle East.

Israel is the only country in the Middle East where Arabs can be elected to the parliament in a democratic election.