“I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don’t think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.”

The Godfather’ was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.

If I ever own a restaurant, I will never allow the waiters to ask if the diners like their dishes. Particularly when they’re talking.

My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.

A director is someone who presides over a series of accidents.

I’m one of those fellows so frightened of driving that I go 80 miles an hour – and the more frightened I get, the faster I go.

The director is the most overrated artist in the world. He is the only artist who, with no talent whatsoever, can be a success for 50 years without his lack of talent ever being discovered.

The most personal thing I’ve put in [Touch of Evil] is my hatred of the abuse of police power. It’s better to see a murderer go free than for a policeman to abuse his power.

The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.

Every true artist must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan.

I have made an art form of the interview. The French are the best interviewers, despite their addiction to the triad, like all Cartesians.

Paris is the playwright’s delight. New York is the home of directors. London, however, is the actor’s city, the only one in the world. In London, actors are given their head.

Hollywood is Hollywood. There’s nothing you can say about it that isn’t true, good or bad. And if you get into it, you have no right to be bitter — you’re the one who sat down, and joined the game.

Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in senate.

When you are down and out something always turns up – and it is usually the noses of your friends.

I’ve read hundreds of cookbooks. For my money, they are the bird.

Money has only a different value in the eyes of each.

Philanthropy is not about the money. It’s about using whatever resources you have at your fingertips and applying them to improving the world.

As a woman finds economic opportunity, even if she’s only earning a couple of dollars a day, if she can save it on her phone, she then makes different decisions for her household than her husband might.

My mantra is if you raise money, don’t waste it.

O, ye who visit the distressed, do ye know that everything your money can buy, given with a cold, averted face, is not worth one honest tear shed in real sympathy?

But there are too many people that make so much money at the cost of lives of other humans and for no reason but to make the money.

Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.