in show business there's not much point in asking yourself if someone really likes you or if he just thinks you can be useful to him, because there's no difference.

At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us.

Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.

Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows; in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably.

Movies that are consciously life-affirming are to be consciously avoided.

The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience - they're inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They're stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie - for any movie - is so strong that all over the country they keep lining up.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.