Have you ever had a single moment's thought about my responsibilities?

It's a passion when you're doing it for other people and you're doing it for the people around you making the film and the people who are going to see the film, and the giving. When you start thinking about you doing it for some sort of self-gain, then I think it becomes an obsession. It becomes a negative experience.

However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

The director's job is to know what emotional statement he wants a character to convey in his scene or his line, and to exercise taste and judgment in helping the actor give his best possible performance.

New York was the only really hostile city. Perhaps there is a certain element of the lumpen literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound that it finds the grandeur of space and the myriad mysteries of cosmic intelligence anathema.

If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.

You know, I often thought that the gangster and the artist are the same in the eyes of the masses. They're admired and hero-worshipped but there is always present underlying desire to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory.