 Frank Capra was a prop man, I think. John Ford was a prop man. It was a little bit of a father and son thing, and you kind of worked your way up. |
| The professional world was much more unpleasant than I thought. I was always wishing I could get back that enthusiasm I had when I was doing shows at college. |
| They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family. |
| When I was going for my graduate degree, I decided I was going to make a feature film as my thesis. That's what I was famous for-that I had my thesis film be a feature film, which was You're a Big Boy Now. |
| I was the kind of kid that had some talents or ability, but it never came out in school. |
| I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing. |
| Anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos. |
| It's ironic that at age 32, at probably the greatest moment of my career, with The Godfather having such an enormous success, I wasn't even aware of it, because I was somewhere else under the deadline again. |
| The essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy. |
| Most Italians who came to this country are very patriotic. There was this exciting possibility that if you worked real hard, and you loved something, you could become successful. |
| I always found the film world unpleasant. It's all about the schedule, and never really flew for me. |
| Listen, if there's one sure-fire rule that I have learned in this business, it's that I don't know anything about human nature. |
| Usually, the stuff that's your best idea or work is going to be attacked the most. |
| I remember teachers who really singled me out for their discouragement. |
| I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten. |
| You ought to love what you're doing because, especially in a movie, over time you really will start to hate it. |
| Ten Days That Shook The World, by Eisenstein, I went to see it, and I was so impressed with this film, so impressed with what cinema could do. |
| I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist, the solo flute for Toscanini. |
| I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue. |
| I became quite successful very young, and it was mainly because I was so enthusiastic and I just worked so hard at it. |
