Marilyn was mean. Terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever met around this town. I have never met anybody as mean as Marilyn Monroe or as utterly fabulous on the screen.

France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can't tear the toilet paper.

Don't be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also.

Ever notice how these European trains always smell of eau de cologne and hard boiled eggs?

Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You've got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven's "Pastoral." A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.

An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius.

Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.