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" It's the hardest thing on earth to like yourself, and then when you do, it's a catastrophe. I mean, the people I know who like themselves - I don't want to see them! "

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" My father wasn't too crazy about me. I loved him anyway. One of the things I regretted for a long time was that he died before he could see that he would be proud of me. I was actually more what he wished for than he thought. "

Mike Nichols

Thought

Father

Time

" Clay Aiken is amazing beyond that glorious voice. Turns out he is an excellent comic actor and a master of character. "

" I'm an enormous fan of 'The West Wing.' It was one of the very few shows I would watch every week. "

" All movies are pure process. A commercial movie isn't less process than an art movie. You can't make your decisions about a film on the basis of, 'Is it important enough? Is it serious enough?' It's either alive or it's not for me. If it's alive, I want to do it. "

" The reason you do this stuff - comedy, plays, movies - is to be seized by something, to disappear in the service of an idea. "

" 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. "

" 'Catch-22' was a nightmare to make, and everybody was unhappy except me. "

" I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That's the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein. "

" 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. "

" Any good movie is filled with secrets. "

" It's not a film-maker's job to explain his technique, but to tell his story the best way he can. "

" It took me forever, learning improvisation, because I had studied with Lee Strasberg - I dropped out of Chicago and went to his classes in New York for a couple of years, once or twice a week. What I didn't realize was I was learning directing because he wasn't all that good about acting, not for me. "

Mike Nichols

New York

Good

" Things come in waves, and I'm always more interested in places like, for instance, Chicago, where people don't follow fashion. They're not galloping past your window on the way to the latest anything. They're living their lives. You do a play, they come and see it and say, 'That's nice', and then they go home. "

" The whole point about laughter is it's like mercury: you can't catch it, you can't catch what motivates it - that's why it's funny. "

Mike Nichols

Point

You

" Fear of comedy is all so much about who you do it with. "

" I think a director can make a play happen before your eyes so that you are part of it and it is part of you. If you can get it right, there's no mystery. It's not about mystery. It's not even mysterious. It's about our lives. "

" For a director, a musical is a special kind of hell. "

" I used to say that winning the Oscar means being back at the Beverly Hills Hotel at 1 A.M. feeling empty. It's the industry voting. It doesn't come from God. It doesn't change your life, really. "

" 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. "

" Directing is mystifying. It's a long, long, skid on an icy road, and you do the best you can trying to stay on the road... If you're still here when you come out of the spin, it's a relief. But you've got to have the terror if you're going to do anything worthwhile. "

" That seems to me the great American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it. "

" Whether something is a success or not has never had much to do with what you do next. "

" 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. "

" I don't expect anything from reviews. Sometimes I am bemused by them. "

" If you're fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 and you're a Jew, you don't think so much about relationships. People didn't have a lot of divorces during the Holocaust, for instance. "

" You want to make money, remake 'Cinderella.' You want to move people, remake the Hippolytus and Phaedra myth. "

" When we talk about reviews, what we are really talking about is just a market report - it's like reading about the new Lexus. You have to know what the guy writing the review cares about to understand his take. Does he like sports cars, or does he like Bentleys? "

" In a weird way, when I was looking back, I didn't know I was going to be a director until I was. "

" It's very weird about movies: you never know which ones are going to stay alive and which one are going to be meaningless. When you're there, you couldn't possibly predict it. Some things slowly die, and others slowly stay a while. "

" The producers want us to sell, sell, sell. That's my little joke. That's what we do by day; by night, we're artists. "

Mike Nichols

Day

Want