Director Quotes

Having sex is like playing bridge. If you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand.

Feelings are not supposed to be logical. Dangerous is the man who has rationalized his emotions.

Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay small acts of kindness and love.

I like cappuccino, actually. But even a bad cup of coffee is better than no coffee at all.

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

It was great. I mean, it's a blast directing underwater stuff.

I do not dream at night, I dream all day, I dream for a living.

Life is a combination of magic and pasta.

A different language is a different vision of life.

There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.

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

You're never going to learn something as profoundly as when it's purely out of curiosity.

One of the reasons I love to jump back and forth between mediums is that film does allow me to be more literal. I can go to the real place. I can go to the Coliseum, and I don't have to fake it.

Sex relieves tension - love causes it.

The ideal husband understands every word his wife doesn't say.

There go the goddamn brownies!

I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox.

The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.

Maybe it's just in America, but it seems that if you're passionate about something, it freaks people out. You're considered bizarre or eccentric. To me, it just means you know who you are.

Live people ignore the strange and unusual. I myself, am strange and unusual.

Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around.

One does not simply walk into Mordor.

There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.

Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.

Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.

Eighty percent of success is showing up.

When I was young, I believed in three things: Marxism, the redemptive power of cinema, and dynamite. Now I just believe in dynamite.

Don't confuse the truth with the opinion of the majority.

When you're in the desert, you look into infinity.

... It makes you feel terribly small, and also in a strange way, quite big.

He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.

Drama is life with the dull bits left out.

There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it. I believe in putting the horror in the minds of the audience, and not necessarily on the screen. The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.

Memory can change the shape of a room;

it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)

When you don’t have many friends and you don’t have a social life you’re kind of left looking at things, not doing things. There’s a weird freedom in not having people treat you like you’re part of society or where you have to fulfill social relationships.

Never say no to an idea - you never know how that idea will ignite another idea.

The beauty of life is in small details, not in big events.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

And Later I Thought, I Can't Think How Anyone Can Become a Director Without Learning the Craft of Cinematography.

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.

A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

I'm happy to report that my inner child is still ageless.

I never felt comfortable with myself, because I was never part of the majority.

I always felt awkward and shy and on the outside of the momentum of my friends' lives.

Dreams are extremely important. You can't do it unless you imagine it.

I'm not afraid of death but I am afraid of dying.

Pain can be alleviated by morphine but the pain of social ostracism cannot be taken away.

I'm like my zombies. I won't stay dead!

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

This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.

When we think we have been hurt by someone in the past, we build up defenses to protect ourselves from being hurt in the future. So the fearful past causes a fearful future and the past and future become one.

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

The concept of absurdity is something I am attracted to.

There is the danger of over preparation, of loss of spontaneity;

over rehearsal is the most terrible thing you can imagine. We do have a very close association between costume and set designer, though. And the cameraman is very important, of course.

In my childhood, America was like a religion.

Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life - in jeeps - and upset all my dreams.

A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.

I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)

Cinema’s characteristic forte is its ability to capture and communicate the intimacies of the human mind.

At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.

The test of a work of art is in the end our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.

I believe in destiny. But I also believe that you can’t just sit back and let destiny happen. A lot of times, an opportunity might fall into your lap, but you have to be ready for that opportunity. You can’t sit there waiting on it. A lot of times you are going to have to get out there and make it happen.