“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.

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.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

She was an absolute genius as a comedic actress, with an extraordinary sense for comedic dialogue. It was a God-given gift.

The showrunner relationship in television is what the director relationship in film, there’s really no more important relationship.

In Kurdistan, theres a lot of hardship – a lot of wars, a lot of bitter and difficult lifestyles. And witnessing all those made me a director.

There’s a whole system in Hollywood where the director never speaks to the studio, but I like to engage them in a discussion. I listen.

The first cut I do is usually between five and 10 minutes shorter then the cut that we release.

Casting directors now just see me as the hard-core sniper or prison guard.

I’m an unusual director in that my cut is usually shorter then the final released film. I like short films.

If the United States is to produce a nation of investors-as we must if we are to gain financial world-leadership-it is imperative that boards of directors be so constituted as to adequately represent the interests and inspire the complete confidence of investors of moderate substance.

Everyone can do a character the way they want to do it, unless the director tells them not to, which isn’t very common.