Every success is built on the ability to do better than good enough. As you climb the ladder of success, be sure it's leaning against the right building. Eighty percent of success is showing up.

My films are misinterpreted all the time. I don't mind that. Everybody's films are misinterpreted. But there's no malice or stupidity in the people that misinterpret them. You know what you do, but someone else sees it, and they want to talk about it or write about it, and so they misinterpret them.

Another good thing about being poor is that when you are seventy your children will not have you declared legally insane in order to gain control of your estate.

How am I immature? Intellectually, emotionally, and sexually. Yeah, but in what other ways?

I've always been lucky in casting. The trick in casting is to hire great people, and let them do what they do, don't interfere with them too much. And then when they're great, take credit for it in the end.

I could turn on my radio in the morning when I was getting dressed for school and hear Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman and think this is the music. Now that music is art. Ellington is art. At that time it was just what you heard on the radio. Cole Porter was just a guy who wrote pretty songs and Billie Holliday would sing them.

It's all through the actors; I cannot write in that idiom