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" 'Catch-22' was a nightmare to make, and everybody was unhappy except me. "
Mike Nichols
Unhappy
Everybody
Make
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" The degree to which you're peculiar and different is the degree to which you must learn to hear people thinking. Just in self-defense you have to learn, where is their kindness? Where is their danger? Where is their generosity? "
Mike Nichols
Thinking
Generosity
Kindness
" If you want to be a legend, God help you, it's so easy. You just do one thing. You can be the master of suspense, say. But if you want to be as invisible as is practical, then it's fun to do a lot of different things. "
Mike Nichols
Fun
Easy
You
" As a director, my job is, and always has been, divided into a number of things: dealing with the crew, the money and the studio, and the marketing and publicity. These are all different jobs that have to be learned and done as well as possible. The celebrity part rarely touches a director. "
Mike Nichols
Celebrity
Money
Job
" Very often when a story really holds us, it gets pushed away because it's too close for comfort. "
Mike Nichols
Comfort
Us
Story
" Oh my God, if I know anything, I know I'm gonna die! I never forget that. I know I'll be forgotten in a minute, and that's just fine with me. "
Mike Nichols
Never Forget
Die
Me
" I had a high school girlfriend whose mother gave us theater tickets, so I saw the second night performance of 'A Streetcar Named Desire.' My girl and I could not get up during intermission, we were so stunned. To this day it's the only thing I've seen on stage that's 100 percent real and 100 percent poetic simultaneously. "
Mike Nichols
Night
Desire
School
" I don't know that a political climate - as long as it's still a free country - makes much difference in the film world. "
Mike Nichols
Know
Free
Film
" You could say that it's in talking movies that inner life begins to appear. You can see things happen to the faces of people that were neither planned nor rehearsed. "
Mike Nichols
Life
Things Happen
People
" Clay Aiken is amazing beyond that glorious voice. Turns out he is an excellent comic actor and a master of character. "
Mike Nichols
Actor
Amazing
Beyond
" Technically, maybe I learned most of all from George Stevens, and among his movies I learned the most from 'A Place in the Sun.' It's a lesson in moviemaking. "
Mike Nichols
Movies
Place
Most
" Fear of comedy is all so much about who you do it with. "
Mike Nichols
Fear
Who
Much
" My first memory in the world is my gym teacher ripping my mother's necklace off her neck and throwing it out the window and her running downstairs to go after it. I have no memory before that. I was 4. My father had a lot of girlfriends and my mother had a lot of boyfriends. "
Mike Nichols
Memory
World
Teacher
" Never let people see what you want, because they will not let you have it. Never let anybody see what you feel, because it gives them too much power. You're probably better off not showing weakness whenever you can avoid it, because they'll go for you. "
Mike Nichols
Power
Better
People
" Everybody wants to be known. Everybody's a Kardashian. "
Mike Nichols
Wants
Known
Everybody
" Chicago is not a very fashion-driven place. Nobody says, 'Oh, you've got to come see these fabulous people!' Nobody cares. "
Mike Nichols
You
Nobody
People
" I never understand when people say, 'Do you do comedy or tragedy?' I don't think they're very much different. They both have to be true, and there isn't a great play in the world that doesn't have funny parts to it - as 'Salesman' does, as 'King Lear' does. The whole idea is to reflect life in some way, which means surely you have to have both. "
Mike Nichols
Funny
Life
People
" I've learned that many of the worst things lead to the best things, that no great thing is achieved without a couple of bad, bad things on the way to them, and that the bad things that happen to you bring, in some cases, the good things. "
Mike Nichols
Good
Good Things
You
" Nerves provide me with energy... It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that's when I get worried. "
Mike Nichols
Energy
Nerves
Feel
" It's very, very corrupting to the spirit, doing comedy. And you have to be almost a saint, like Jack Benny was, like Steve Martin is, to avoid the corrupting of it, because there's very little work where the actual work and the reward are simultaneous, and comedy is that. "
Mike Nichols
Doing
Reward
Work
" As a little kid in a sometimes hard place, I went to the movies as often as I could. Movies - making them, seeing them - is not something that could ever lose its pleasure for me. That puts them on a short list of things that eternally give me joy - love, family, food, movies. "
Mike Nichols
Family
Love
Joy
" Stand-up comedy is a very hard thing on the spirit. There are people who transcend it, like Jack Benny and Steve Martin, but in its essence, it's soul-destroying. It tends to turn people into control freaks. "
Mike Nichols
Control
Comedy
Turn
" The reason that most British actors are better than most American actors in the end is that they don't make any money. At the very end of their lives, they get into a space movie and they make a lot of money, but until that happens, basically, they don't have bank accounts. They live from day to day. "
Mike Nichols
Money
Space
End
" Most great plays of the past lose their grip on immediacy; on application to our lives right now. "
Mike Nichols
Past
Now
Most
" You want to make money, remake 'Cinderella.' You want to move people, remake the Hippolytus and Phaedra myth. "
Mike Nichols
You
Myth
Move
" I'm in the theater because of two plays: 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and 'Death of a Salesman.' "
Mike Nichols
Desire
Two
Salesman
" All the theories that acting is reacting to imaginary circumstances as though they are real, and directing is turning psychology into behavior, those are all stabs at something that can't be taught. All the great actors can't talk about what they do, and they don't want to begin to talk about it. They just do it. "
Mike Nichols
Behavior
Circumstances
Great
" In a weird way, when I was looking back, I didn't know I was going to be a director until I was. "
Mike Nichols
Back
Know
Looking Back
" I'm an enormous fan of 'The West Wing.' It was one of the very few shows I would watch every week. "
Mike Nichols
Fan
Few
West
" I don't expect anything from reviews. Sometimes I am bemused by them. "
Mike Nichols
I Am
Expect
Sometimes
" A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't. "
Mike Nichols
Either
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