When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.

I don't think Roger Ebert has ever mentioned a screenplay. He assigns every auctorial move to the director, which makes some sense since the director has run a one-off game, but if Hamlet were written last year and had been only performed once as a film, and it didn't come off well on screen for whatever reason, it would be gone forever as a literary work, and never would have been considered as one.

I learned my job from English dramatists. Tennessee Williams was no good for me, New York stuff was no good to me.

In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.

If you need someone to come out of the sewer with a wire you don't hire someone who needs laborious collective instruction. You let someone do his job, whether he's a focus puller or a surgeon.

I don't trust a lot of popular films because they seem to indicate that people would like to be super-heroes or vampires, and that's the last thing I mean by the useful mirror of art.

I'm not very precious at all, which I think people find surprising.