“Develop a clean line of action for your leading character”

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.

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

To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has a kind of consciousness.

There’s a certain line between jokes and music and poetry that’s a bit blurred in my mind.

Brick and mortar businesses – and the communities that depend on them – cannot continue to bear an unfair sales tax burden from which their on-line competitors are effectively exempt.

It is shameful that millions of Americans are suffering the economic injustice of working a full-time job and earning a wage that leaves them below the poverty line.

If you try to deliver a funny line in a funny way, it comes out as wacky and you ruin the scene.

For all the progress, we recognize we’re very far from the finish line.

I’d love to have a shoe line, or a sunglasses line, or a purse line. Who am I kidding, I’d like to have an everything line!

I sat down one night and wrote the line rock, rock, rock everybody.