When you've got some talent, your job is to use it.

I find that when you open on a group of people sitting down and talking, the scene sits down with them. The best antidote for that is an entrance. Begin the scene with someone entering, and somehow it’s more interesting.

Fortune favors the prepared.

I don't think plot as a plot means much today. I'd say that everybody has seen every plot twenty times. What they haven't seen is characters and their relation to one another. I don't worry much about plot anymore.

I guarantee you that two directors that are any good can take the same story, change the name of the characters, change the name of the town, and make an entirely different picture.

I get a little sick of these New Yorkers who want me to make some psychic thing, like 'The Left-Handed Gun.' They don't know anything about Western history.

I made 'Rio Bravo' with John Wayne. It worked out pretty well and we both liked it, so a few years later we decided to make it again. Worked out pretty good that time, too.