Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.

The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

One shouldn't ever be conscious of the author as lecturer. When social or moral points are too heavily stressed, I always get uncomfortable.

Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.

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

I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.