213 Quotes by Sydney Pollack

People ask me over and over how is it that I work with stars. How do you work with Barbra Streisand, with Paul Newman, with Al Pacino, with Sally Field, Jane Fonda, you work with all these people. Isn't this a problem? And it isn't a problem at all. It's terrific. It's great fun. And I don't know what the answer is.

I am not a farceur. I am not Blake Edwards.

I really think that people never go wrong by telling the truth.

I don't have a style. I've never thought of myself as a stylist like the visual stylists I admire enormously - Adrian Lyne, Ridley Scott, Alan Parker - in which every shot has a great idea in them.

I do not have a good control of running sight gags. I laugh like hell when I see them, but I don't know how to invent those jokes.

No country could claim to be civilized if its legal system weren't available to everyone in it.

It would be a great vacation to act in a movie if I weren't directing it. But to do it while you're directing interferes with your concentration, and I wouldn't do that again.

The marketing of anything is full of exploitation and lies and hype.

I will not ever say that it's good to start with too little preparation, because that's patently not true. But I don't rehearse the way a lot of directors do, to stage a scene in terms of manners and attitudes and lock them in.