CINEMA QUOTES
QUOTES ABOUT MOVIES
MOVIES
"Life is a tragedy when seen in close up, but a comedy in long shot." - Charles Chaplin"A film is born in my head and I kill it on paper. It is brought back to life by the actors and then killed in the camera. It is then resurrected into a third and final life in the editing room where the dismembered pieces are assembled into their finished form." - Robert Bresson
"A film is a petrified fountain of thought." - Jean Cocteau
"The cinema is truth 24 frames per second." - Jean-Luc Godard
"Movies are a world of Fragments." - Jean-Luc Godard
"Drama is life with the dull bits left out." - Alfred Hitchcock
"The cinema is not a slice of life, it's a piece of cake." - Alfred Hitchcock
"The length of the film should be directly related to the endurance of human bladder." - Alfred Hitchcock
"A good film is when the price of the admission, the dinner and the babysitter was well worth it." - Alfred Hitchcock
"It isn't easy to do in the theatre, but it's twice as hard in the film." - Arthur Miller
"What is Cinema? We might as well ask "What is life?", for film, like life, is made of moments; moments in time, held aloft for our perusal, imprinted on our soul, and then brought back to us from time to time as a memory -- by an event, a vision, a sound, an emotion. The separation becomes trivial -- cinema is life, and life cinema: around us, beside us, inside us. The cinema, then, is not to be consumed with haste; films are not to be digested simply as they unfold, like some plastic-wraped fast-food. Created by light and celluloid, they live only in our minds and in our hearts, savoured both during and after the fact. Projected onto the screen and into our consciousness, where they are replayed over and over -- continually re-discovered artefacts which are constantly changing us. What, then, can we say is truly real? A memory? An event? A celluloid image? The answer lies in the cinema. All is real. Nothing is impossible." - Glen Norton
"Of course all films are surrealist. They are making something that looks like the real world but isn't." - Michael Powell
"The saving grace of the cinema is that with patience, and a little love, we may arrive at that wonderfully complex creature which is called man." - Jean Renoir
"The trouble with a movie is that it's old before it's released. It's no accident that it comes in a can." - Orson Welles
DIRECTORS
""This big store, they sell shoes and I make gloves." - Robert Altman"All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl." - Charles Chaplin (My Autobiography)
"Even if I set out to make a film of a fillet of sole, it would be about me." - Federico Fellini
"Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera." - Jean-Luc Godard
"That was the ending I wanted for Blackmail, but I had to change it for commercial reason." - Alfred Hitchcock
"There is no terror in a bang, only in the anticipation of it." - Alfred Hitchcock
"If I made Cinderella, the audience would be looking out for a body in the coach." - Alfred Hitchcock
"I let the audience use their imaginations. Can I help it if they misconstrue my suggestions?" - Ernst Lubitsch
"The difference between me and Lubitsch is that he shows you the king on the throne and then he shows you the king in his bedroom. I show you the king in his bedroom first. Then when you see him on the throne you have no illusions about him." - Erich von Stroheim
QUOTES IN MOVIES
Alpha 60: "Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world." - Alphaville (Godard)
Prof. von Braun: "Men of your type will soon become extinct. You'll become something worse than dead. You'll become a legend." - Alphaville (Godard)
Harry Lime: "In Italy for thirty yeard 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." - The Third Man (Reed)
Walter Neff: "So I let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn't fool me for a minute, not this time. I knew I had ahold of a red hot poker, and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off... I was all twisted up inside and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hope was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning." - Double Indemnity (Wilder)
Hildy Johnson: "Now get this, you double-crossing chimpanzee! There ain't gonna be any interview and there ain't gonna be any story. And that certified check of yours is leaving with me in twenty minutes. I wouldn't cover the burning of Rome for you if they were just lighting it up. And if I ever lay my two eyes on you again, I'm gonna walk right up to you and hammer on that monkey skull of yours 'til it rings like a Chinese gong!" - His Girl Friday (Hawks)
Brigid O'Shaughnessy: "I haven't lived a good life. I've been bad, worse than you could know."
Sam Spade: "You know, that's good, because if you actually were as innocent as you pretend to be, we'd never get anywhere." - Maltese Falcon (Houston)
Hans Beckert: "It's there all the time, driving me out to wander the streets, following me, silently, but I can feel it there. It's me, pursuing myself! I want to escape, to escape from myself! But it's impossible. I can't escape, I have to obey it. I have to run, run... endless streets. I want to escape, to get away! And I'm pursued by ghosts. Ghosts of mothers and of those children...they never leave me. They are always there... always, always, always!, except when I do it, when I.... Then I can't remember anything. And afterwards I see those posters and read what I've done, and read, and read... did I do that? But I can't remember anything about it! But who will believe me? Who knows what it's like to be me? How I'm forced to act... how I must, must... don't want to, must! Don't want to, but must! And then a voice screams! I can't bear to hear it! I can't go on! I can't... I can't...." - M (Lang)
"The children of Marx and Coca-Cola" - intertitle in Masculin-feminin (Godard)
Charlie: "You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it." - Mean Streets (Scorsese)
Octave: "Everyone has his reasons." - The Rules of the Game (Renoir)
"Perhaps an object like this will make it possible to link up..., to move from one subject to another, from living in society, to being together. But then, since social relations are always ambiguous, since my thought is only a unit,...since an immenses moat separates the subjective certitude that I have for myself from the objective truth that I am for others, since I never stop finding myself guilty, even though I feel innocent, since every event transforms my daily life, since I always seem to fail to communicate...since...since...since I can't tear myself away from the objectivity that crushes me, nor from the subjectivity that isolates me, since it isn't possible for me either to raise myself into Being, or to fall into Nothingness..., it's necessary that I listen, it's necessary that I look around me more than ever...the world...my fellow creatures...my brother..." - a narrator in 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her (Godard)
John Ferguson(Scottie): "And then what did he do? Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? Did he tell you exactly what to do and what to say? You were a very apt pupil, too, weren't you? You were a very apt pupil. Why did you pick on me? Why me?...
And the necklace, Carlotta's necklace, there was where you made your mistake, Judy. You shouldn't keep souvenirs of a killing. You shouldn't have been, you shouldn't have been that sentimental." - Vertigo (Hitchcock)