Some people demand a five-line capsule summary. Something you'd read in a magazine. They want you to say, 'This is the story of the duality of man and the duplicity of governments.' I hear people try to do it -- give the five-line summary -- but if a film has any substance or subtlety, whatever you say is never complete, it's usually wrong, and it's necessarily simplistic: truth is too multifaceted to be contained in a five-line summary. If the work is good, what you say about it is usually irrelevant.

Critical opinion on my films has always been salvaged by what I would call subsequent critical opinion.

There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die.

No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.

In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.

One does not have to make Frank Capra movies to like people.

You either connect or you don't connect. It's not the end of the world. It's a movie.