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.

If there's anything to learn from the history of movies, it's that corruption leads to further corruption, not to innocence.

Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.

Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.

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.

The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.

It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack.