I realized than an author cannot also be a producer.

When I was young, I believed in three things: Marxism, the redemptive power of cinema, and dynamite. Now I just believe in dynamite.

In my childhood, America was like a religion. Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life - in jeeps - and upset all my dreams.

My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice-versa.

The important thing is to make a different world, to make a world that is not now. A real world, a genuine world, but one that allows myth to live. The myth is everything.

When you manage to express something with a look and the music instead of saying it with words or having the character speak, I think it's a more complete work.

Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price. That is why the bounty killers appeared.

Probably the greatest writer of westerns himself was Homer. His character were never all good or all bad. They're half and half, these characters, as all human beings are.

You see in Once Upon a Time in the West the whole film moves around her [Claudia Cardinale]. If you take her out, there's no more film. She's the central motor of the entire happening.

There are directors, and there are authors. I think I am more of an author than a director.

I can't see America any other way than with a European's eyes. It fascinates me and terrifies me at the same time.

Everything stinks till it’s finished.

Employment is the biggest form of slavery

Stable MIND is the healthiest...

We do not need presidents who are bigger than the country, but rather ones who speak for it and support it.

My wife Susi and my kids quite simply are the most fun of all my friends.

You see, I am a very conventional scientist, really.

A lofty sense of independence is, in man, the best privilege of his nature.

You're only as good as your last record and you could get dropped.

The fish that first ventured ashore had considerable practical problems.

I have always had a curious nature; I enjoy learning, but I dislike being taught.