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" My grandparents, they came through Ellis Island in 1923, and you know, I'd heard all the stories. "

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" The closer you can get to being personal, the better the work is, or the more interesting the work is. "

" At a certain point, you have to kind of realize that greatness is a messy thing. "

" Unfortunately for critics and audiences alike, I have made several films, and some films with really terrific actors. And I say this at my own peril, but Marion Cotillard is the best actor I've ever worked with. "

" I think true economic class unhappiness comes from when across the street someone has a new Cadillac and you can't get that. "

" William Atherton has a very different acting style to Bonnie Bedelia; she has a very different style than Bruce Willis. "

" There's never really been a tradition of making films about Jewish themes or using Judaism as a constant. "

" I'm just not willing to give up on myself. If I'm going to fail, then I want to fail to the limits of my talent. "

" I know this sounds phony, but I don't start out on a project going, 'I'm going to make an emotional work,' you know what I mean? You try to tell the story directly and honestly and with passion. "

" I suppose I'm always trying to break down the wall between my characters and myself. I'm trying to make the film as expressive and personal as I can, even if I can't explain, for example, how important it is for me to be Jewish. "

" The conventional wisdom is that people come to the United States, and immigration is so great, and they say, 'America, what a great country.' And a lot of that is true. "

" What a director really does is set the emotional temperature and the mood and the level, amount, or lack of, distance between the action and the character, and the character and the audience. "

" The first movie, I was 23; I thought I knew everything, but my ego soon took an irrevocable blow. "

" Melodrama is one of the most stunning art forms. These are stories where the emotions are big, and the situations are big, and the artists believe in the situation dramatically. There's no irony or distance. "

" My wife thinks I have an obsession with social class. So I guess I have an obsession with social class. It probably stems from feeling like an outcast. "

" I think I'm a very American director, but I probably should have been making movies somewhere around 1976. I never left the mainstream of American movies; the American mainstream left me. "

" It's weird, because American films in the 1930s and '40s, particularly melodramas, were made for woman, from Bette Davis to Joan Crawford to Barbara Stanwyck to Katherine Hepburn, and for some reason we've taken a step backward in this sense. "

" The idea that the family is this locus of support but can also hold you back and keep you down makes for good drama. "

" I went to see 'Star Trek Into Darkness,' and J.J. Abrams, who's a friend of mine, made this film, and I went to see it at the premiere. Believe it or not, I was really blown away by the comic timing of it. "

" The key to humor is often self-loathing or sarcasm. In a sense, that's how self-loathing is made palatable. "

" I continually marvel at people who can make films that reach five hundred million people. How do you do that? Everybody's different - I don't know how that works. "

" I'm telling you, every film I've ever made has been hated by the U.K. critics. "

" If you read about the astronauts who went to the moon - the 12 who walked on it, and the others who orbited - all suffered serious mental trauma of one kind or another. "

" My wife and I had been to the genetic counselor; my wife is not Jewish - she's the shiksha goddess type - and was negative for everything. But I was positive. I carried the gene for three genetic disorders, which, if she had been positive for, we would have passed down to the child. "

" It's hard to run away from who you are, and when your taste is formed is a very important thing. "