213 Quotes by Sydney Pollack

You don’t normally do another presentation of All About Eve. You do one All About Eve, and that’s it.

Well, there’s no question that a good script is an absolutely essential, maybe the essential thing for a movie.

I think it’s a terrible shame that politics has become show business.

I see my job as trying to entertain you, to be balanced in some way, and morally responsible. I don’t want to glorify a killer. I don’t want to glorify a rapist. I don’t want to do those things, but on the other hand I don’t want to lecture to you, either.

I have one life. I am a certain age. I’m married to one person. I have a certain number of children. I won’t have another life other than that, but I do have many lives through the films.

I have to have a working knowledge of light, and optics, film emulsions and their properties, and lenses, otherwise I can’t create the shoots that are the vocabulary of the films. But it is not necessary for me to be a cameraman, I can hire a cameraman.

I mean, the truth of the matter is, I like the failures as much as I like the successes, it’s only the world that doesn’t like the failures.

I’ve produced my own films for twenty years now – it means I have to talk to less people.

Making films is much more difficult than people imagine, and so the experience of actually directing them is not one I’ve ever relished.