“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 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.

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 have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment.

I don’t know what drives me to succeed. I know I want to always do the best I can. I never was like that as a kid.

Never let your work drive you. Master it and keep it in complete control.

I set myself that decision, otherwise I’m driving an opinion at you, and I think that would be treating you like you’re an idiot. I don’t want to force-feed you my opinion.

I’m a born librarian with a sex drive.

Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.

The best job a man could have would be a chef. They’d understand the long hours I work and the drive and ambition it takes to succeed.

You didn’t grow up driving…you figured it out.

If doctors are paid the same salary as bus drivers, community would not be crazy about making their children doctors.