The ultimate trick is to convince, persuade. Every single person out there is an idiot, but collectively they're a genius.

A bad play folds and is forgotten, but in pictures we don't bury our dead. When you think it's out of your system, your daughter sees it on television and says, My father is an idiot.

We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.

The forest of Compiegne. Look at it. Like a kind grandmother dozing in her rocking chair. Old trees practicing curtsies in the wind because they still think Louis XIV is king.

On Ernst Lubitsch: He could do more with a closed door than other directors could do with an open fly.

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

Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.