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.

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.

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.

It's very difficult to be original.

It’s funny, for all it took was a broken heart and that alone was enough, enough for her to do everything she ever dreamed of.

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.

A guy walks up to me and asks, "What's Punk?". So I kick over a garbage can and say. "That's punk!". So he kicks over the garbage can and says, "That's Punk?", and I say, "No that's trendy!

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.

It may be argued that to know one kind of beetle is to know them all. But a species is not like a molecule in a cloud of molecules-it is a unique population.

I've played a lot of bad guys, 'cause that was the only work I could get. People saw my face and went 'oooh'.

A girl's night for me is with a member of my family on the couch, eating takeout, watching something good, going to sleep early, it's so boring, but it's just what I need!

Human mind can grasp everything in the universe; but it cannot change everything!

If a man sits down to think, he is immediately asked if he has a headache.

Elijah Wood is interested in people, in life and in music.