693 Quotes About Film

In all of its operations, cinema ceaselessly strives, and fails, to make present a world hopelessly beyond grasp. For this reason cinema is, in its very nature, a nihilistic medium.

I've never seen Star Wars or The Godfather, so that would be a good excuse for us to spend a bunch of time together.

The longing for improvement and the fear of waste and worse - it is a pattern still with us, and maybe it speaks to the medium's essential marriage of light and dark, or as Mary Pickford put it in her autobiography (published in 1955), Sunshine and Shadow. Light and dark were the elements of film, and they had their chemistry in film's emulsion. They had a moral meaning, too. But not everyone appreciated that prospect, or credited how it might make your fortune.

There is a Pirate in every one of us.

Piracy of Bollywood; or Bollywood of Piracy, Tough to Say.

Filmmaking is akin to writing on water.

Everybody has something that chews them up and, for me, that thing was always loneliness. The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are.

In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters.

The lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have.