Famous Quotes & Sayings

Akira Kurosawa

Human beings share the same common problems. A film can only be understood if it depicts these properly.

Billy Wilder

A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.

Billy Crystal

I was a film-directing major at NYU. I'm still not sure why I became a directing major, when I was really an actor and a comedian, but there was something that drew me to doing that.

Alfred Hitchcock

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

Jean Renoir

A Director Makes Only One Movie in His Life. Then He Breaks It Into Pieces and Makes It Again.

Mathieu Amalric

I directed three films and each time [I act] I hope it's the last time so I have time to do my film [directing].

Steven Spielberg

People have forgotten how to tell a story.

Stephen Frears

I teach film directing, inasmuch as you can. Its not really possible to teach film direction, but I sit there as a sort of testimony of experience and know-how, I suppose.

Stanley Kubrick

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction.

Isabella Rossellini

It always amazed me that people believed I was this beautiful object.

Isabella Rossellini

I'm always a little worried when people have met me in person because I'm worried they'll be disappointed.

Rick Perlstein

Do people still read before bed? I play 'Words With Friends.'

Robert Mankoff

People often ask me about my upbringing, and if there was anything particular about it that made me become a cartoonist.

Robert Mankoff

I don't think most people know what's going to be in their obituary, but I do.

Robert Teeter

There are not enough people out talking about the President positively.

Roger Penrose

Some people take the view that we happen by accident. I think that there is something much deeper, of which we have very little inkling at the moment.

Kristy Swanson

My parents were like the kind of people who read the 'Enquirer' and believed everything it said.

Malorie Blackman

I think what we need, especially in publishing, is more commissioning editors and editors who are people of colour.

Denis Johnson

We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.

Denis Johnson

I didnt finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldnt work and I didnt have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more.

Edgar Allan Poe

You will observe that the stories told are all about money-seekers, not about money-finders.

Eleanor Roosevelt

About the only value the story of my life may have is to show that one can, even without any particular gifts, overcome obstacles that seem insurmountable if one is willing to face the fact that they must be overcome.

Eduardo Galeano

So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: Tell me! Tell me! The stories choose me.

Elizabeth Bishop

I HATED the Salinger story. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?

Elizabeth Edwards

A lot of sad stories in a row - that wears on you.

Elizabeth Bowen

every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?

Elizabeth Bowen

Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.