51 Quotes by James Ivory

This may sound corny, but I've always liked to make things that were beautiful.

Political consequences have never really come into my thinking. I didn't think about it when we made 'Maurice' or when I said first I would co-direct and then write the screenplay of 'Call Me'. I was just making something I thought I would enjoy creating.

I was in New York one day, and this guy ran off a bus, grabbed me, and told me that 'Maurice' had changed his life. I've also had it many, many times in England.

I can tell you that when Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, our writer, when she would work on some of these grander novels like, say, a book like 'The Golden Bowl', that would take her months and I wouldn't know what she was doing, really.

I never work on a computer. I can't write on a computer. It's just not possible for me to do that.

Most of my films are set in an upper-middle-class world of well-off people who may have all kinds of emotional problems, but they live well.

When you tell a film financier that you want to do a Shakespeare film, their face drops. Shakespeare films don't have a very wonderful history at the box office.

Maybe there's something in the Oregon character that pushed me into the kind of life that I took up.

I wanted to make a movie once at Lake of the Woods, where my parents had a cabin, which I now have. We actually planned, we wrote a whole screenplay about a kind of Indian spiritual group that was at Lake of the Woods. We weren't calling it that but it was Lake of the Woods. We wrote a whole screenplay about it but we couldn't get funding for it.