It is a depressing fact that Americans tend to confuse morality and art (to the detriment of both) and that, among the educated, morality tends to mean social consciousness.

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

In a foreign country people don't expect you to be just like them, but in Los Angeles, which is infiltrating the world, they don't consider that you might be different because they don't recognize any values except their own. And soon there may not be any others.

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

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

A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is.

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.