Yes. The whole point about laughter is it's like mercury: you can't catch it, you can't catch what motivates it - that's why it's funny.
Mike NicholsThe only safe thing is to take a chance. Play safe and you are dead. Taking risks is the essence of good work, and the difference between safe and bold can only be defined by yourself since no one else knows for what you are hoping when you embark on anything.
Mike NicholsDirecting is mystifying. It's a long, long, skid on an icy road, and you do the best you can trying to stay on the road... If you're still here when you come out of the spin, it's a relief. But you've got to have the terror if you're going to do anything worthwhile.
Mike NicholsNerves provide me with energy... It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that's when I get worried.
Mike NicholsWill we allow the decline of our language-the language of Shakespeare, Shaw and Steinbeck? Will we abuse our precious gift of communication? Will we bite our mother tongue with the teeth of indifference, crushing the taste buds of clarity and, without prompt application of the antiseptic of education, causing the gangrene of strained metaphors? Stand up, America, and let me hear your answer: Ain't no way, dude!
Mike NicholsI love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. Thatโs the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.
Mike NicholsNo doubt you are as alarmed as I by the tragic decline in America's language skills. If 10 people read the following sentence: Two tanker trucks has just overturned in Alaska, spilling a totel of 10,000 gallons of beer onto a highway. two would find an error in subject-verb agreement, two would find an error in spelling, and six would find a sponge and drive north.
Mike NicholsThat seems to me the greatest American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.
Mike NicholsIn making movies, time is so short-because it is so expensive-that we tend to neglect the place from which the best ideas come, namely that part of ourselves that dreams. The unconscious is our best collaborator.
Mike NicholsThereโs nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what youโre meant to do. Itโs like falling in love.
Mike NicholsIt's not a filmmaker's job to explain his technique but to tell his story the best way he can.
Mike NicholsI came to love silence, because it's so rare, and it's now my favorite aural condition.
Mike NicholsAll the theories that acting is reacting to imaginary circumstances as though they are real, and directing is turning psychology into behavior, those are all stabs at something that can't be taught. All the great actors can't talk about what they do, and they don't want to begin to talk about it. They just do it.
Mike NicholsIt's the hardest thing on earth to like yourself, and then when you do, it's a catastrophe. I mean, the people I know who like themselves - I don't want to see them!
Mike NicholsTake off all your clothes and walk down the street waving a machete and firing an Uzi, and terrified citizens will phone the police and report, There's a naked person outside!
Mike Nichols