19 Quotes Tagged: films

"People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn't it?"

[Interview in The Independent, 15 October 2005]

Never marry someone who doesn’t love the movies you love. Sooner or later, that person will not love you.

"The Godfather, A Place in the Sun, Dodsworth, Galaxy Quest — these are perfect films. They start with a simple premise and proceed logically, and inevitably, toward a conclusion both surprising and inevitable. [From the chapter "The Script."]"

The comic book is not the book. the graphic novel is not the novel. The same, of course, is true of films and television. When we move a story from one medium to another, no matter how faithful we attempt to be, some changes are inevitable. Each medium has its own demands, own restrictions, its own way of telling a story.

You think beautiful girls are going to stay in style forever? I should say not! Any minute now they're going to be out! Finished! Then it'll be my turn!

Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.

"No law against waiting," I said, "people do it all the time." For once, I didn't say too much, I didn't say too little, I said just what I said and then walked.

Cinema is a language. It can say things — big, abstract things. And I love that about it. I’m not always good with words. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words. But cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things, because you’ve got time and sequences. You’ve got dialogue. You’ve got music. You’ve got sound effects. You have so many tools. And you can express a feeling and a thought that can’t be conveyed any other way. It's a magical medium. For me, it’s so beautiful to think about these pictures and sounds flowing together in time and in sequence, making something that can be done only through cinema. It's not just words or music — it’s a whole range of elements coming together and making something that didn’t exist before. It’s telling stories. It’s devising a world, an experience, that people cannot have unless they see that film. When I catch an idea for a film, I fall in love with the way cinema can express it. I like a story that holds abstractions, and that’s what cinema can do.

Estoy seguro que a cualquiera le gusta un buen crimen, siempre que no sea la víctima

"It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it."
Andy Warhol

The only place where you can be a dictator and still be loved is on the movie set

"You know what your problem is, it's that you haven't seen enough movies - all of life's riddles are answered in the movies."
Steve Martin

I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.)

What’s this for?’ I said. And this veck replied, interrupting his like song an instant, that it was to keep my gulliver still and make me look at the screen. ‘But,’ I said, ‘I want to look at the screen. I’ve been brought here to viddy films and viddy films I shall.

"Every great film should seem new every time you see it."
Roger Ebert