There are directors, and there are authors. I think I am more of an author than a director.

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

Charlie Chaplin, too, through spectacle, contraband certain ideas, put them through, ideas that even today are not being expressed by great statesmen and politicians.

I began to understand that 'America' in reality belonged to the whole world and not just to Americans. The idea of America had already been invented by the philosophers, the vagabonds, the dispersed of this earth, long before the Spanish ships got there. Those whom we call Americans have only rented it for a time. If they behave badly, we can discover another 'America'. The contract can be canceled at any time.

Producing films was a distraction for me for which I payed dearly.

When I used Claudia [Cardinale] for example, in Once Upon a Time in the West, she represented the birth of American matriarchy. Because women had enormous weight in America.

I consciously chose a person like the bounty killer [of the Fistful trilogy] because he was the street sweeper of the desert, a man who put his life at risk exclusively for the money. I'm not saying that he went against the law, but he put himself within the wings of the law only when it was something that he could profit by.