I'm delighted with it, because it used to be that films were the lowest form of art. Now we've got something to look down on.

One's too many and a hundred's not enough.

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.

I had one life. And what did I do? Wasted it in some palooka preliminaries in Spain, just before Hitler and Chamberlain warm up for the main event.

I am big. It's the pictures that got small.

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

I never overestimate the audience, nor do I underestimate them. I just have a very rational idea as to who we’re dealing with, and that we’re not making a picture for Harvard Law School, we’re making a picture for middle-class people, the people that you see on the subway, or the people that you see in a restaurant. Just normal people.