“You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

“Women are another race. They are always changing, like the moon. You can only win by being the cool center of their being. You have to represent something solid and loving. The anchor. Even if you are not. You can't tell them the truth. You have to lie and play games. I’ve never in my entire life been with someone with whom I didn’t have to play a game. I've never been with anyone with whom I could be exactly who I am.”

“Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.”

“Like so many people, I only remembered Orson Welles as this huge, fat, bearded figure selling wine in TV commercials. So whenever anyone said I looked like Orson Welles I said that I wasn't that fat, and I would get on a diet, quickly.”

“Criminals are never very amusing. It's because they're failures. Those who make real money aren't counted as criminals. This is a class distinction, not an ethical problem.”

“Personally, I don't like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she'll fool her husband, I figure she'll fool me.”

“Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.”

“I have an unfortunate personality.”

“I've never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies... Egotism and laziness. And they're all lit like television shows.”

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”

“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”