53 Quotes by Robert Towne

She's my daughter. She's my sister.

Every search for a hero must begin with something which every hero requires - a villain.

Forget it, Jake -- it's Chinatown.

Jake Gittes: Do you accept people of the Jewish persuasion?Mr. Palmer: I'm sorry, we do not.Jake Gittes: Don't apologize - neither does Dad.

You must be dumber than you think I think you are.

Of course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.

Now they're attracted to one another, but repelled by their ethnic origins, so that there was something to overcome. They had to overcome their own prejudices, which had been imposed by the culture - their own shame at being Mexican and Italian.

One of the reasons for going back into the past is that it's almost the only place that there's any drama.

I think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible.