"A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet."
- Orson Welles
"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder."
- Alfred Hitchcock
"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."
- Stanley Kubrick
"Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award."
- Billy Wilder
"I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians."
- Francis Ford Coppola
"Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls."
- Ingmar Bergman
"I like some of the early silent films because I love to watch how actors had to play then. What would interest me today is to do a silent film."
- Catherine Deneuve
"There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness."
- Frank Capra
"We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies."
- Walt Disney
"People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning."
– Steven Spielberg
"Film is incredibly democratic and accessible, it’s probably the best option if you actually want to change the world, not just re-decorate it."
- Banksy
"There is no reason why challenging themes and engaging stories have to be mutually exclusive – in fact, each can fuel the other. As a filmmaker, I want to entertain people first and foremost. If out of that comes a greater awareness and understanding of a time or a circumstance, then the hope is that change can happen."
- Edward Zwick
"Pain is temporary, film is forever!"
- John Milius
"I'm going to make a film where not one word is really important. I'm going to make it all action."
- Elia Kazan
"Editing feels almost like sculpting or a form of continuing the writing process."
- Sydney Pollack
"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations."
- Orson Welles
"A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end… but not necessarily in that order."
- Jean-Luc Godard
"I had no desire to be an film actress, to always play somebody else, to be always beautiful with somebody constantly straightening out your every eyelash. It was always a big bother to me."
- Marlene Dietrich
"I give the spectator the possibility of participating. The audience completes the film by thinking about it; those who watch must not be just consumers ingesting spoon-fed images."
- Michael Haneke
"I'm not a film star, I am an actress. Being a film star is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity."
- Vivien Leigh
"Films are always pretentious. There’s nothing more pretentious than a filmmaker."
- John Milius
"Self-plagiarism is style."
- Alfred Hitchcock
"I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it re-creates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It’s my way of telling a story."
– Federico Fellini
"All I Need to Make a Comedy is a Park, a Policeman and a Pretty Girl."
- Charlie Chaplin
"Photography is Truth. The Cinema is Truth Twenty-four Times Per Second."
- Jean-Luc Godard
"A Film is a Petrified Fountain of Thought."
- Jean Cocteau
"If only those who dream about Hollywood knew how difficult it all is."
- Greta Garbo
"Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul."
- Marilyn Monroe
"The ladder of success in Hollywood is usually a press agent, actor, director, producer, leading man; and you are a star if you sleep with each of them in that order. Crude, but true."
- Hedy Lamarr
"I survived because I was tougher than anybody else."
- Bette Davis
“When I make a film I’m always in reality among the trees, and among the people like yourselves. There’s no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality as there is in literature. The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality.”
– Pier Paolo Pasolini
"Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation."
- Orson Welles
" I lived in Hollywood long enough to learn to play tennis and become a star, but I never felt it was my home. I was never looking for a home, as a matter of fact. "
- Paulette Goddard
"Hollywood is like life, you face it with the sum total of your equipment."
- Joan Crawford
"Hollywood always wanted me to be pretty, but I fought for realism."
- Bette Davis
"I arrived in Hollywood without having my nose fixed, my teeth capped, or my name changed. That is very gratifying to me."
- Barbra Streisand
"I know when I'm working I seldom get into trouble. My educated guess is that boredom has caused most of the problems with Hollywood celebrities."
- Hedy Lamarr
"In Hollywood, an equitable divorce settlement means each party getting fifty percent of publicity. "
- Lauren Bacall
"Everyone should see Hollywood once, I think, through the eyes of a teenage girl who has just passed a screen test."
- Gene Tierney
"I loved to eat. For all of Hollywood's rewards, I was hungry for most of those 20 years."
- Gene Tierney
"Growing up in Hollywood it seemed like every kid was the child of some star."
- Liza Minelli
"Is Hollywood the cruelest city in the world? Well, it can be. New York can be that, too. You can be a Broadway star here one night, and something happens, and out--nobody knows you on the street. They forget you ever lived. It happens in Hollywood, too."
- Buster Keaton
"I came over here (Hollywood) to act, but it turned out all I had to do was to be high-minded, long suffering, white-gloved and decorative."
- Deborah Kerr
"In Europe an actor is an artist. In Hollywood, if he isn't working, he's a bum."
- Anthony Quinn
"It's said in Hollywood that you should always forgive your enemies - because you never know when you'll have to work with them."
- Lana Turner
"They've great respect for the dead in Hollywood, but none for the living."