It seems to me that everybody who's a success has made a decision to put themselves in a situation that eats away at their privacy. Their hours just don't end. Now, with actors it's extreme, because their privacy is almost nonexistent.

You listen to the audience. The audience is wrong individually and always right collectively. If they don't laugh, it isn't funny. If they cough, it isn't interesting. If they walk out, you are in trouble.

Hollywood is a cottage industry involving a very small number of people, and around the edges are enormous numbers of people trying to get into it and work.

For writers that rehearsal period is death. It is the most destructive thing of all to a script.

There are two kinds of actors: those with one job too few, who have to take every one that comes along, and those with one job too many, who can always turn down the one they don't want.

Disease, a simple famine, plagues of locusts everywhere, or a cataclysmic earthquake, I'd accept with some despair, but no, you sent us Congress! Good God, Sir, was that fair?

The rehearsal period is so far away from the time when the scene will actually be shot that very little is remembered.