Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The opera in Los Angeles is excellent.
Baseball is the greatest thing in the world.
Time can be very good or very cruel to films.
Life affirming doesn't mean good things happen.
When I was quite young, I dreamed of being a painter.
Sean Penn has announced his retirement from acting about 72 times.
I have no athletic skills whatsoever. I'm just literally incompetent.
I was going to Studio 54 when I was 12 years old. It's true. It's crazy.
I had written 'Two Lovers' before we started shooting 'We Own the Night.'
I'm telling you, every film I've ever made has been hated by the U.K. critics.
At a certain point, you have to kind of realize that greatness is a messy thing.
I don't envy the job of people who have to watch five movies a day - that's insane.
'Apocalypse Now' does not alienate us or deconstruct itself. In fact, it welcomes us in.
I feel like it's a real shame that my generation doesn't make an appearance at the opera.
It's hard to run away from who you are, and when your taste is formed is a very important thing.
The first movie, I was 23; I thought I knew everything, but my ego soon took an irrevocable blow.
There are very few movies in English about romantic obsession told with a seriousness of purpose.
My grandparents, they came through Ellis Island in 1923, and you know, I'd heard all the stories.
The closer you can get to being personal, the better the work is, or the more interesting the work is.
There's never really been a tradition of making films about Jewish themes or using Judaism as a constant.
Melodrama and melodramatic are not the same thing, and often people make the mistake of confusing the two.
The life of a film is very strange. Once the film is done, you wish you could forget about it and move on.
The key to humor is often self-loathing or sarcasm. In a sense, that's how self-loathing is made palatable.
I'm just not willing to give up on myself. If I'm going to fail, then I want to fail to the limits of my talent.
I think storytelling is a thing of beauty, and also very difficult. It's a craft you have to continue to work at.
I would love it if my films made a lot of money, and may I say that 'The Yards' is the only one that's lost money.
I live up Laurel Canyon, and if I want to walk with my son, I have to drive to the park, which is so insane to me.
Americans have always been excellent at making romantic comedies - but dramatically, we don't really try to do it.
The idea that the family is this locus of support but can also hold you back and keep you down makes for good drama.
For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.
You should just write the movie based on people you actually know and then just see who wants to play it. Cast the net.
William Atherton has a very different acting style to Bonnie Bedelia; she has a very different style than Bruce Willis.
I start with a mood or an idea that comes from a personal place emotionally, and the narrative concepts come much later.
I think true economic class unhappiness comes from when across the street someone has a new Cadillac and you can't get that.
All I can say is sometimes home gets burned into your occipital lobe, and it can't leave you, and there's always that longing.
I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater.
The audience cares what the movie looks like, not about the sleepless night you had worrying about the thing getting developed.
My grandparents used to tell me stories about their trip to Ellis Island from Russia and life on the Lower East Side of New York.
The state of being in love is so inherently preposterous. It usually lends itself to romantic comedy. I think we've all been there.
At Ellis Island, I mean, you didn't go there if you arrived in first class. It was only the poorest, the people in the worst shape.
It's much easier to make a movie with kind of stylistic pyrotechnics because you can hide behind that if there's a gap in the story.
I'm not a website guy, although I'm not a Luddite, either. I have looked at a computer, but I don't go to PopSugar and Goop and all that.
If we continue as we have for the past 20 years in California, in the year 2020, everybody in the State will either be in prison or running one.
At least in America, the narrative is I'm a Cannes favorite. But, in fact, I've had my best experience in Venice, both with the audience and the jury.
My wife thinks I have an obsession with social class. So I guess I have an obsession with social class. It probably stems from feeling like an outcast.
There's virtually nothing made up in 'The Immigrant.' So much of the film came from somewhere in my family's past. All the details are from my own family.
'Apocalypse Now' poses questions without any attempt to provide definitive answers, and the film's profound ambiguities are integral to its enduring magic.
I continually marvel at people who can make films that reach five hundred million people. How do you do that? Everybody's different - I don't know how that works.
I have no interest whatsoever in pursuing acting or becoming a mogul. I love writing and directing; I see those two jobs as the most critical in the making of a film.
If you read about the astronauts who went to the moon - the 12 who walked on it, and the others who orbited - all suffered serious mental trauma of one kind or another.