The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.

I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form (and to other experience as well) if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgments, if we are electic.

In San Francisco, vulgarity, "bad taste," ostentation are regarded as a kind of alien blight, an invasion or encroachment from outside. In Los Angeles, there is so much money and power connected with ostentation that is no longer ludicrous: it commands a kind of respect. For if the mighty behave like this, then quiet good taste means that you can't afford the conspicuous expenditures, and you become a little ashamed of your modesty and propriety.

Television represents what happens to a medium when the artists have no power and the businessmen are in full, unquestioned control.

If you're afraid of movies that excite your senses, you're afraid of movies.

Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts—it's when those who shouldn't, do.

The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again.