"Give me a couple of years, and I'll make that actress an overnight success."

"In the 1930s people went to see films not just to be entertained or to escape the dreariness of their workaday lives but to gain an education, to see the world, to learn table manners and interior decoration, how to dress, kiss, to laugh and cry, how to react to tragedy and h

"In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director."

"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder."

"A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it."

"In films murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is and what a messy thing it is to kill a man."

"Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher."

"A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later."

"The secret to film is that it's an illusion."

"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."