I think, to go to the bottom of it all, that the films I have made and my kind of film-making is a hybrid type of film-making - in that it isn't American, it isn't Italian.

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.

In a brain scan, relational pain—that caused by isolation during punishment—can look the same as physical abuse. Is alone in the corner the best place for your child?

The best museum is Bloomingdales.

Her [ Onata April] great talent as an actress is that she has the ability to understand and listen to the scenario and what the story is, and then she can pretend and live that.

A half-truth does more mischief than a whole lie.

Write down the most important things you have to do tomorrow.

My house is small, but may heaven grant that it is never full of friends.

I experienced the discomfort of those who have moved mentally, but are still clamped, physically, to the places they have moved from.

Libraries are the center of our lives. There's no use going to a university if you don't live at the library.

Death rides on every passing breeze, He lurks in every flower.

I have a lot of energy, a lot of interest, a lot of desire.