“This award is meaningful because it comes from my fellow dealers in celluloid.”

In a good marriage each is the others better half.

I have a perfect cure for a sore throat: cut it.

I’m sure anyone who likes a good crime, provided it is not the victim.

I have a feeling that inside you somewhere, there’s somebody nobody knows about.

Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.

I’m not against the police; I’m just afraid of them.

I can’t read fiction without visualizing every scene. The result is it becomes a series of pictures rather than a book.

In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

Reality is something that none of us can stand, at any time.

A woman who spends all day washing and cooking and ironing doesn’t want to go to the movies to watch a film about a woman who spends all day washing and cooking and ironing.

If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book – it makes a very poor doorstop.

One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedly, as in life.

The picture’s over. Now I have to go and put it on film.

To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script and the script.

Really, the novelist has the best casting since he doesn’t have to cope with the actors and all the rest.

A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box.

I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.

But I wondered, how would I feel about killing someone? Now I know. It’s no big deal.

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it’s complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he’s able to keep processing that as well.

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.

Everyone is dealing with something. This is life; this is not just a piece of cake. You expect that when your teammates are doing their jobs, so you got to compartmentalize and do your job.

I don’t pretend to be wise, but I am observing, and I see a great deal more than you’d imagine. I’m interested in other people’s experiences and inconsistencies, and, though I can’t explain, I remember and use them for my own benefit.