Great Throughts Treasury

"The most adventurous thing I've done is learn how to fly a helicopter in the Philippines. One night we landed on a beach and slept on it."

"The internet in hotels should be free - and I really resent it when they charge you five dollars for a bottle of water beside your bed."

"The only TV I would be interested in exploring would be live television. There's no substitute for a team of artists performing at their peak live when failure is possible. It's a high-wire act. That excites me."

"There's a hormone secreted into the bloodstream of most writers that makes them hate their own work while they are doing it, or immediately after. This, coupled with the chorus of critical reaction from those privileged to take a first look, is almost enough to discourage further work entirely."

"There's something in my heart that isn't yet fulfilled. Maybe it's a sickness. But I'm definitely not satisfied. It's not do to with money - I'm richer than I ever thought I would be. It's not fame - I'm more famous than I've ever been. It's something else. Something personal. I would like to leave ten films that I have written, original work. That would satisfy this itch."

"There was a little bit of tittering when the young boys were in bed, partly because they were such beautiful kids. But of course, brothers have slept together in beds for hundreds of years."

"They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family."

"The professional world was much more unpleasant than I thought. I was always wishing I could get back that enthusiasm I had when I was doing shows at college."

"The stuff that I got in trouble for, the casting for The Godfather or the flag scene in Patton, was the stuff that was remembered, and was considered the good work."

"They say that "A Streetcar Named Desire" really is Tennessee Williams' expression of himself as Blanche, as someone talented and fragile, fragile in a world of harsh reality."

"To me, it was fun... To them, it was a life-and-death career thing."

"This idea of Metallica or some rock n' roll singer being rich, that's not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I'm going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money? In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you'd be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, "Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money." Because there are ways around it."

"We developed that script, David Peoples and I. We worked on it for months. The film was made based on that script we finished. Nobody wanted to make it. I'd even sent it to Clint Eastwood to act in it. I don't know whether he read it. Finally after two or three years of paying the options, I let it go and then Clint picked it up."

"We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane."

"We do things for good reasons that are bad."

"We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can't steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that's how you will find your voice."

"We were there with our tongues out over Diane Lane. If it hadn't been for her dad being there, we would have drawn and quartered her."

"We teach our boys to firebomb villages, but we won't let them write fuck on the side of their planes because it's obscene."

"We were raised in an Italian-American household, although we didn't speak Italian in the house. We were very proud of being Italian, and had Italian music, ate Italian food."

"What the studios want now is "risk-free" films but with any sort of art you have to take risks. Not taking risks in art is like not having sex and then expecting there to be children."

"When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material."

"Well, yeah, because I feel that all films shouldn't be sequels. Sequels are not done for the audience or cinema or the filmmakers. It's for the distributor. The film becomes a brand."

"When I was about nine, I had polio, and people were very frightened for their children, so you tended to be isolated. I was paralyzed for a while, so I watched television."

"When I was going for my graduate degree, I decided I was going to make a feature film as my thesis. That's what I was famous for-that I had my thesis film be a feature film, which was You're a Big Boy Now."

"When I was about 9, I had polio, and people were very frightened for their children, so you tended to be isolated. I was paralyzed for a while, so I watched television."

"When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have."

"When newspapers started to publish the box office scores of movies, I was horrified. Those results are totally fake because they never include the promotion budget."

"You donÂ’t have to specialize - do everything that you love and then, at some time, the future will come together for you in some form."

"When you lose your kid, it's the first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning for about seven or eight years. Then there's the first morning when that's not the first thing you think of. You get brave."

"You ought to love what you're doing because, especially in a movie, over time you really will start to hate it."

"Your work parallels your life, but in the sense of a glass full of water where people look at it and say, 'Oh, the water's the same shape as the glass!'"

"You're in a profession in which absolutely everybody is telling you their opinion, which is different. That's one of the reasons George Lucas never directed again."