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" Nerves provide me with energy... It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that's when I get worried. "

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" Being with an insanely jealous person is like being in the room with a dead mammoth. "

" If you lose a parent, it never goes away. As a kid, I dreamed about my father coming back for 15 or 20 years. I still do sometimes. "

" 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. "

" I am drawn to the mystery of marriage. You can never know what the contract is between two people, and that is a very strong subject. I think it may be my subject. "

" The only safe thing is to take a chance. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Chicago is not a very fashion-driven place. Nobody says, 'Oh, you've got to come see these fabulous people!' Nobody cares. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The greatest thrill is that moment when a thousand people are sitting in the dark, looking at the same scene, and they are all apprehending something that has not been spoken. That's the thrill of it, the miracle - that's what holds us to movies forever. It's what we wish we could do in real life. "

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

" Any good movie is filled with secrets. "

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

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

" The things that you saw earlier in your life generally have more power than the things you saw last week. "

" 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. "

" Here's the most mysterious thing to me. I look back at those first plays I did and the first movies I did, and I only have one question, which is, 'What was I so confident about? Where did I get that? "

" I'm anything but confident. "

" 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. "

" I think that to make something alive, instead of on a page, is an honorable task. And it turns me on. "

" 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. "

" I came to love silence, because it's so rare, and it's now my favorite aural condition. "

" Most great plays of the past lose their grip on immediacy; on application to our lives right now. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

" American society to me and my brother was thrilling because, first of all, the food made noise. We were so excited about Rice Krispies and Coca-Cola. We had only silent food in our country, and we loved listening to our lunch and breakfast. "