An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.

My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?

If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.

You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.

If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.

Eighty percent of a picture is writing, the other twenty percent is the execution, such as having the camera on the right spot and being able to afford to have good actors in all parts.

I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.

If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.

The way to understand any enemy is to realize that, from his perspective, he is not a villain but a hero.

Freedom is not procured by a full enjoyment of what is desired but by controlling that desire.

Prevention is better than cure.

I never think of myself as wise. I think of myself as possessing a critical intelligence which I intend to allow to operate.

Gross things sound funny and set people up to listen to something a little uninviting.

Where books are burned in the end people will be burned too.

We must live a holy life if we want to pray.

I'm a big fan of things in writing in general that are subtle, that suggest something without actually in-your-face saying it.

Success lulls you. It makes the most ambitious of us complacent and sloppy. In a way, you have to cultivate a kind of amnesia and forget all of your previous prosperity.

Your first encounter of the day has a more direct bearing on your attitude for that day than your next five encounters.