"Computers combine things to make new knowledge at such high speed that we cannot absorb it."

"Husbands should revolt from time to time. Even the best circus-number becomes boring if the beast is too tame."

"One shouldn't ever be conscious of the author as lecturer. When social or moral points are too heavily stressed, I always get uncomfortable."

"I'm a provincial. I live very much like a hermit: reading, listening to music, working in the cutting room, writing, commercial work - which doesn't take up that much time."

"I'm a provincial. I live very much like a hermit: reading, listening to music, working in the cutting room, writing, commercial work - which doesn't take up that much time."

"I have all the equipment to be a politician. Total shamelessness."

"There are a thousand ways of playing a good classic. If it were effective, I would play Hamlet on a trapeze."

"FDR used to say, 'You and I are the two best actors in America'."

"Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me."

"By nature, I am an experimentalist. I don't believe much in accomplishment."

"Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of failure with a death in it. But there is more lost paradise in them than defeat."

"I love moving around from town to town. I never got on a train in my life without my spirits rising."

"I must be sincere towards what I am. ... Experimenting is the only thing that fills me with enthusiasm. ... It is the only sphere where I feel really honest and sincere."

"Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there."

"I don't pray because I don't want to bore God."

"When television came along, I'd already done more than 10 years of radio work and I thought everyone would want me. I sat around waiting for the phone to ring - and it didn't."

"A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own."

"Hollywood expects you to experiment but on a film that makes money and if you don't make money, you're to blame. Your job is to make money."

"You could write all the IDEAS of all the movies, my own included, on the head of a pin."

"[The movies] make the sort of comment only a novel can make, an allusion to the world in which people live, the psychological and economic motivations, the influences of the period in which they lived."

"My definition of success is not having things thrown at me!"

"It would be so much better if the critics would come, not on first nights, but on last nights, when they could exercise their undoubted flair for funeral orations."

"I'm a lurid character!"

"I discovered at the age of six that everything was a phony, worked with mirrors. Since then, I've always wanted to be a magician."