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" There are absolutely almost perfect people who experience no guilt; they don't know what it is. They simply do what they need to do - or want to do - next. They see nothing wrong with it. They feel no guilt. They express no guilt. And it's not even certain what harm they do. "

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" 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. "

Mike Nichols

Much

Think

You

" You can always tell gifted and highly intelligent people as they always turn to the past. Any young person who knows anything that happened before 1980, or 1990, or 2000 for that matter, is immediately someone who is intelligent, probably creative, maybe a writer. Nobody who is drawn to the past and learning about the past is not gifted. "

" Any good movie is filled with secrets. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't know that a political climate - as long as it's still a free country - makes much difference in the film world. "

" I asked a shrink: 'Everything is so great. Why am I still so angry?' He said, 'Anger doesn't go away.' I always thought it was kind of a good engine. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

" 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

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

" 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. "

" I keep coming back to it, over and over - adultery and cheating. It's the most interesting problem in the theater. How else do you get Oedipus? That's the first cheating in the theater. "

" 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. "

" There's nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you're meant to do. It's like falling in love. "

" We are being entertained all the time - in the bathroom, on the train, in our beds. Sure, there is a smaller audience for theater. But we know from radio that entertainment never goes away, it just changes. And more power to it. "

" 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? "

Mike Nichols

Here

Confident

" A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't. "

Mike Nichols

Either

You

" Limitations are inspiring: they lead to thinking, so I don't mind them. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" Everybody wants to be known. Everybody's a Kardashian. "

" 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. "

" 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! "

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