Quote collection
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"It's important to control yourself because life gets too complicated if you don't, but the impulse is often there for people. Some say society should be more open. That doesn't work either."
"People always tease me. They say, look at you, you went for so much psychoanalysis and you're so neurotic, you wind up marrying a girl so much younger than you."
"I enjoy the making of the film and it's something for me to do. If nobody ever comes to my films, if people don't want to give me money to make films, that will stop me. But as long as people come all over the world and I have an audience and I have ideas for films, I will do them for as long as I enjoy the process. And I like the whole process of making a film."
"If I was to see any of my films now I would feel, oh god you know it's awful I could do that so much better now. Look at all the terrible things I did and all the mistakes and all the compromises and all the blunders I made, and it would be such a terrible experience for me to see them. So it's better that I put it out and move on to the next thing and make it history as quickly as possible."
"My experience creatively is different than my experience in life, for, as my father would say, the simple reason that you can't get hurt when everything goes wrong creatively."
"Culturally speaking, I was raised in a Jewish household. In addition to the religious side of it, I was taught respect for books and learning and the higher professions like medicine and law and teaching."
"People still have existential anxiety. It just may not be expressed in Hebraic idiom."
"That's the way I feel about the world: there are certain problems that can only be dealt with that way - going out and doing them. As ugly a truth as that is, I do think it's the truth about the world."
"That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives. All the attendant hoopla about it, the success over it or the critical rejection—none of that really matters. In the end, the thing will survive or not on its own merits. Not that immortality via art is any big deal. Truffaut died, and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it’s not much help to Truffaut."
"My films are a form of psychoanalysis, except that it is I who am paid, which changes everything."
"My heart says one thing. My head says another. Very hard to get your heart and head together in life."
"The heart wants what it wants."
"Twenty-one years ago, when I first heard Mia Farrow had accused me of child molestation, I found the idea so ludicrous I didn't give it a second thought. We were involved in a terribly acrimonious breakup, with great enmity between us and a custody battle slowly gathering energy. The self-serving transparency of her malevolence seemed so obvious I didn't even hire a lawyer to defend myself. It was my show business attorney who told me she was bringing the accusation to the police and I would need a criminal lawyer."
"Rather than live on in the hearts and minds of my fellow man, I would rather live on in my apartment."
"I love the rain - it washes memories off the sidewalk of life."
"I can live in Paris for four months or London or, you know, Barcelona. These are places that are like New York. But I don't think I could live in many places. When I had to make a film in the United States I picked San Francisco because to me it's one of the great cities of America."
"The roe is reputed to sleep for a thousand years and then suddenly rise in flames, particularly if it was smoking when it dozed off."
"Between the Pope and air conditioning, I'd choose air conditioning."
"To me there’s no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They’re all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful."
"I said this to my daughter, if you don't practice the guitar, when you get older you wouldn't be able to play it. It's that simple. If you want to play the guitar, you put a half hour in everyday, but you have to do it."