Classic Film Quotes

Never say never, for if you live long enough, chances are you will not be able to abide by the simplest of such injunctions. ~ Gloria Swanson

Your generation - you've not heard the Verve or Jimi Hendrix or Eminem, you've not read The Catcher in the Rye, you've not seen a classic film like Terminator or Blade Runner. All you've done is read dross, listen to crap and watch Disney movies with happy endings. And what kind of generation have we produced? A slow, simple, dull one who never questions anything. A stunted generation. It's devolution because in order for society to progress, you need to be able to debate ideas, to question, to see the dark and the light in things ~ Sam Mills

Deanna Durbin's movies are about innocence and sweetness. They're from a different time and a different place. Outside the movie house, there was Depression, poverty, war, death, and loss. Audiences then were willing to pretend, to enter into a game of escape. No one really thought that the world was like a Deanna Durbin movie, they just wanted to pretend it was for about an hour and a half. ~ Jeanine Basinger

It's sad that women characters have lost so much ground in popular movies. Didn't 'Thelma and Louise' prove that women want to see women doing things on film? Thelma and Louise were in a classic car; they were being chased by cops; they shot up a truck - and women loved it. ~ Robin Quivers

My dad had a commercial film company, so he had a videotape player before anyone. So he got Mel Brooks movies or Citizen Kane or some classic old movies. And every summer the revival house in Evanston would show the great films from the '50s and '60s and '70s. ~ John Cusack

'The Goonies' is classic. That's, like, the movie I bring with me if I go out of town for a long time, because it just makes me think of the best times I've seen it with my friends growing up. Dude, everybody knows that movie, everybody watches that film. Best family film ever made. ~ Logan Lerman

I watch all the classic films that film people say that you ought to have seen, and I try to watch things in the cinema when they come out, just to keep my eye on the competition. I'm bored when I'm not working. ~ Sam Riley

I came out of film school and went after movies that I thought audiences wanted to see or that the studios wanted, as opposed to the movies that I wanted. Over the last 10 years, I've gravitated more and more toward the films that I grew up loving - classic Spielberg, Lucas, James Cameron and Ridley Scott movies. ~ Simon Kinberg

To evoke the classic period of Italian cinema in a little film seemed like a great, fun thing to do. I had relations to that period. I had known Fellini and I had known Antonioni. I had made a movie with Antonioni and I had visited Fellini in his studios. So, it seemed like something worthwhile doing. You bring yourself to that mythical cinema. ~ Wim Wenders

The act of seeing any film generally is you knowing more than the characters, even if it's the classic Hitchcock shot of two people talking and a bomb being under the table. Part of the pleasure of it is seeing where people go wrong, and the irony of situations. ~ Richard Ayoade

That is where the irony of the film comes off, in terms of the language it employs - where he tries desperately to be a 'TV Dad,' to give advice and it's so pat it becomes ridiculous. ~ Atom Egoyan

With two hours until her mother picked her up, Janey was alone, woozy and heart-swollen in the downtown, wandering wet streets that gleamed as you would have them gleam in the sweet summer film of your life. ~ Wells Tower

I feel as if I became a documentary film-maker only because I had writer's block for four decades. There's no other good reason. ~ Errol Morris

I simply can't understand the stereotyping women as film makers who make soppy family dramas. Look at Katherine Bigelow: she has directed Point Break and Strange Days. I hate labels of any kind. Just because you are a woman you can't do this or that? Twenty years ago women entering the work force was enough of a shock. People just like the predictable; they feel safe with it. You know, it's such a bore ~ Deepa Mehta

I have a hard time articulating the emotional experience of working on a film. Even when I have meetings on films or discussing them with directors, I find that's my biggest challenge. Different words mean different things to people. ~ Amy Adams

The Big Nurse is able to set the wall clock at whatever speed she wants by just turning one of those dials in the steel door; she takes a notion to hurry things up, she turns the speed up, and those hands whip around that disk like spokes in a wheel. The scene in the picture-screen windows goes through rapid changes of light to show morning, noon, and night - throb off and on furiously with day and dark, and everybody is driven like mad to keep up with that passing of fake time; awful scramble of shaves and breakfasts and appointments and lunches and medications and ten minutes of night so you barely get your eyes closed before the dorm light's screaming at you to get up and start the scramble again, go like a sonofabitch this way, going through the full schedule of a day maybe twenty times an hour, till the Big Nurse sees everybody is right up to the breaking point, and she slacks off on the throttle, eases off the pace on that clock-dial, like some kid been fooling with the moving-picture projection machine and finally got tired watching the film run at ten times its natural speed, got bored with all that silly scampering and insect squeak of talk and turned it back to normal. ~ Ken Kesey

It's hard to make a living in this business. Unions aren't as strong as they used to be. For a journeyman actor - someone who doesn't have a famous name but has consistent work in theater or film or TV - it has become harder to get through, harder to raise a family. ~ Annette Bening

It's very, very tempting to make a superhero film or show and make it about the powers. ~ Charlie Cox

Sometimes I ask myself questions... Sometimes I ask myself, is this your real life or is this just a pilot film? Is my life a thirty-nine week series or is it a special?"
"Whatever it is, your ratings are down... Five cents, please! ~ Charles M. Schulz

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio. ~ William Shakespeare

I realise that a novel and a film are different mediums. As artistes, we need to respect other artistes. It also needs a lot of courage to take risks to experiment and interpret known literary works. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

But then male directors also have a hard time getting their movies made ... not as hard as women but it's a tough time for any movie this size. And that particular movie [The Hurt Locker] was so specific. It couldn't hurt, of course, and I'm really glad for her, but I don't know how much it will change things, if at all. The film industry is still so sexist. ~ Nicole Holofcener

When I started to realise how important the film was to people I thought there is a lot of negative stuff going on in the world, maybe they need these two people ~ Jim Carrey

In a film called 'Senna,' the clue is in the title, and we have a Brazilian badge on our sleeve as we were making it. We were making it from Senna's point of view, with Senna narrating it. ~ Asif Kapadia

I always thought I was going to be the film guy until I died. ~ M. Night Shyamalan

The only way to ensure a film is going to sell is put Will Smith in it and you open it in 3,000 theaters and make sure we have all the top promotional spots in each venue. ~ Omar Epps

Well, in the theater, I think you're actually more responsible for what is going on onstage as a director than you are in film. ~ Philip Seymour Hoffman

It really depends, but, generally speaking, just because of the mechanics of it, voice-over is easier because there is no hair, no makeup, no wardrobe, no fittings, no line memorizing. You don't have to me woken up in Russia at 6 in the morning and go film a scene. It's just easier on the body, the family life to do voice-overs. ~ Kathy Najimy

On the rare occasions on which a movie was shown, there was as much suspense in the audience over whether the electricity would hold out to the end of the film as there was in the film itself. ~ Robert A. Caro

I watched a film with a very famous, great, great actor, I won't mention his name because everyone loves his memory, but I thought, "God he was acting a lot." Great actor, but nonstop acting. Wall to wall, fitted-carpet acting. ~ Anthony Hopkins

When I first read 'Lord of the Rings,' I wanted to see a film of it. But at that time, the technology wasn't there; there was no such thing as CGI. ~ Christopher Lee

Of all the disciplines involved in making anything - TV, film or anything I do - the writing is the most valuable commodity. ~ Ricky Gervais

What does it mean to be truly educated?

I think I can do no better about answering the question of what it means to be truly educated than to go back to some of the classic views on the subject. For example the views expressed by the founder of the modern higher education system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, leading humanist, a figure of the enlightenment who wrote extensively on education and human development and argued, I think, kind of very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively independently without external controls.

To move to a modern counterpart, a leading physicist who talked right here [at MIT], used to tell his classes it's not important what we cover in the class, it's important what you discover.

To be truly educated from this point of view means to be in a position to inquire and to create on the basis of the resources available to you which you've come to appreciate and comprehend. To know where to look, to know how to formulate serious questions, to question a standard doctrine if that's appropriate, to find your own way, to shape the questions that are worth pursuing, and to develop the path to pursue them. That means knowing, understanding many things but also, much more important than what you have stored in your mind, to know where to look, how to look, how to question, how to challenge, how to proceed independently, to deal with the chal ~ Noam Chomsky

When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page. ~ George Steiner

So it goes."
Unlike many of these quotes, the repeated refrain from Vonnegut's classic Slaughterhouse-Five isn't notable for its unique wording so much as for how much emotion - and dismissal of emotion - it packs into three simple, world-weary words that simultaneously accept and dismiss everything. There's a reason this quote graced practically every elegy written for Vonnegut over the past two weeks (yes, including ours): It neatly encompasses a whole way of life. More crudely put: "Shit happens, and it's awful, but it's also okay. We deal with it because we have to. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I have a really difficult time watching myself on film. I literally cower in my seat and cover my face. ~ Brooklyn Decker

It was only after Pather Panchali had some success at home that I decided to do a second part. But I didn't want to do the same kind of film again, so I made a musical. ~ Satyajit Ray

I love to not work. I love to go to the movies, I like to travel ... I think I work maybe half the year. Sometimes, people think I've done three films in a year, but it's because I did a participation in a film. But I work for half a year, no more. ~ Catherine Deneuve

On 11 September 2012 crowds of friendly locals in Kabul, Afghanistan, were chanting the usual 'Death to America' slogans. At the same time American flags were torched from London to Sydney. And in Benghazi, Libya, a group of 'spontaneous protesters' arrived at the US consulate with rocket-propelled grenades and savagely murdered the US ambassador. In Washington, members of the Obama administration were, as we have already seen, showing that they weren't taking any of this personally. It wasn't about them and it certainly wasn't about their ambassador, who had in fact been murdered by terrorists in a pre-planned attack. The administration was still claiming all this was caused by an excerpt from an amateur film which had been up on YouTube for weeks. ~ Douglas Murray

I love seeing somebody act real earnest and serious, like Jackie Gleason. He makes me laugh because he reflects back to me my own serious-mindedness and how ridiculous it all is. It's always easier to see somebody else in that position than yourself, and you laugh. It's like the classic slipping on the banana peel, or someone getting hit by a pie in the face. Why do those things make us laugh? Is it from relief, like: Thank God it wasn't me? Or is it something else: I'm being very serious now. I'm pontificating earnestly and solemnly about - POW! PIE IN THE FACE! The bust-up of certainty. ~ Jeff Bridges

I always think it's better to take a smaller role in a great film rather than a leading role in something that you don't have complete faith in. ~ Charlie Hunnam

At Babbo, each dish grew out of a conversation, trying to put something forth that was new and different. It was a combination of culinary adventurism and the dining-room experience with respect for the classic but with an eye toward innovation. And it was about eating locally, whether produce or fish or meat. ~ Joe Bastianich

Just as violence is the last refuge of the inarticulate, so it is also the first resort of the incompetent, the easy out for the man who is capable of expressing himself only in the most primitive and vulgar of dramatic terms. He leaves us with only the obscenity of violence per se - and the pornographer thereof will always be with us, in film as in any other medium. And so will his audience. ~ Judith Crist

In my real life I live in the countryside, I walk a lot, I shoot clay pigeons, I don't get involved in the film business or anything, and then in my cinematic life, I think I am drawn to the dark side. ~ Nick Love

People ask me about fighting in real life and, honestly, it wouldn't look as graceful as it does in film and TV. ~ Rachel Nichols

If everyone were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic. ~ Gertrude Stein

One of the things I tried to do is to kind of talk my actors through the scene, but at the same time let them know how I plan to shoot the film and just give them an insight into the way I'm thinking, so that when they're acting out their scene, they can kind of see it in their minds' eyes. ~ James Wan

As you go through history, I didn't think it was going to get quite this close. So it's just one of those recurring things ... I hope this doesn't come true in our country. Maybe the film will waken people to the situation. ~ George Lucas

You usually find me writing what I like to think of as intelligent summer action and genre films. ~ Max Landis

With theater, depending on the audience, the show is different every night and really requires your constant concentration. With film, it's more possible to focus for shorter, more intense bits of time. ~ Andre Holland

I love film, but it's bringing me away from music. Singing is what I'm probably most passionate about. ~ Mandy Moore

We had a moment in the '40s and '50s, where female characters were very strong in film, where these incredible roles were written for women like Joan Crawford, like Bette Davis. But then there was a space of time where - I don't know why - it wasn't like that. It became difficult for women to find certain roles after a certain age. ~ Monica Bellucci

You see, I have many friends in the Hindi film industry. ~ Kabir Bedi

I made a French film called 'Merry Christmas' which is a very European film. It's a World War I piece. ~ Diane Kruger