51 Quotes by James Ivory

A director must be patient and unflappable. I think I was always pretty relaxed. I don't find shooting as traumatic as some directors do. Some hate it. But you also have to be strong-willed and persistent enough to get what you want.

Love is the absolute basis of my career.

There's a cabin in Oregon I go to, which belonged to my parents. It's never been winterized. It's not a place you want to be after the first of October or before the first of June. I go for about three weeks every summer.

It's always a matter of convincing the insurance people. They seem to think that after a certain age, you're just going to fall over or something.

It's important to see the work of as many directors as possible but you must not become self-conscious. You have to accept that your first attempts are going to be quite rough compared to the finished works of great masters.

You can just start shooting things and see how it goes. But time is still money, so you have to know when you are finished. It's not like painting a picture which you could go on refining for 20 years - with a film you have to stop at some point, and that is no bad thing.

When I grew up there weren't any sort of terrible things that happened. I had very understanding friends and my parents didn't live that long. I had a blessedly lucky youth and growing up.

The conscious decision, early on, was that I was going to live in New York. That was it.

I went to Europe in '52 or '53, and when I came back, I stopped in New York. I remember looking out of a window on a glorious October morning and there was New York. And I thought, 'I'm coming here. This is for me.'