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.

Great movies are rarely perfect movies.

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

There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use of the only counter-balance: the freedom of the press to say that there's anything conceivably damaging in these films - the freedom to analyze their implications. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?

The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new

Economy, speed, nervousness, and desperation produce the final wasteful, semi-incoherent movies we see.