Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.

In my real movie-going days, which were the thirties, you didn't stand in line. You strolled down the street and sallied into the theater at any hour of the day or night.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

I seem to have no dress sense at all. I'm always being listed in New York among one of the ten worst dressed men of the year. Someone once described me as "looking like an unmade bed." He was right!

Criticism is the essence of creation.