I always fish out antique ideas, very old ideas.

I've tried to consider stories that I have read, making them into films, but they would turn out unnatural. If a producer wants that, he should call other people. Not me.

I had more trouble than I had a sense of utility or satisfaction. But it served to occupy me and to keep me occupied in a field that I love - which was cinema - while I was waiting to realize the film that I wanted to do, which was Once Upon a Time in America, which took ten years of thinking and working to realize.

Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price. That is why the bounty killers appeared.

My films are often characterized by the lack of women present in them, except for this last one [Once Upon a Time in America].

I didn't want [actress] just to be a woman standing at the window, waving hello and goodbye to men as they came and went in the world that they were struggling through. I wanted her to have a true function.

I'm terrified by young people who are doing what they think is film making. What they're really doing is taking that convulsed, fast rhythm of commercials. It's not film making.