33 Quotes by Robert Benton

Movie narration in the forties was radically different than the narrative involved in books.

Style tells you a lot more about the truth than substance, because it comes at the truth in an oblique way, it comes in on a slant, it doesn't tell you what it is. It's unexpected and it makes you laugh and think.

People who go for humor are wonderful because they do great humor. People who go for wit and end up with humor are people who have made a mistake.

After the war, photography came alive, in part because everybody started to use the 35mm camera, and worked on the street instead of in a studio, and that made an enormous difference in not only how photographs looked, but what they were about.

The thing I loved the most about being art director was picking the photographers and working with them.

I was dyslexic as a child and it took me years to get passed that. I read a lot but it was hard and that didn't go away until my early-to-mid-twenties. So really what I was looking at were the photographs and the illustrations in magazines.

Every since high school I've been drawn to magazines.

There was a kind of cultural life in New York that wasn't as solidified as it is now, it wasn't as money-driven. If you look at the size of the successful art galleries compared to the size of galleries now - there was no such thing as the Gagosian Gallery or Pace Gallery. But it was a time when magazines were a vital part of American life, and Esquire gave me a free pass to every world - I could get to the art world, the theater world, the movie world. It allowed you to roam through the cultural life of New York City.

Although I had a few jobs that I didn't like, or quit, or got fired from, I really loved New York from the moment I got here and I never stopped.