Producing films was a distraction for me for which I payed dearly.

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.

I walked inside and paused for a moment to breathe in the scent of paper and dust—the perfumes of knowledge.

Give all the power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all the power to the few, they will oppress the many.

One great cause of failure is lack of concentration.

The human race is a remarkable creature, one with great potential, and I hope that 'Star Trek' has helped to show us what we can be if we believe in ourselves and our abilities.

If your life turns out to be good and you have a tremendous amount of luck in your life, it's a good thing to turn around and make it work for others.

Woman is the unfathomable, incalculable mystery, the problem we men can never hope to solve.

It's entirely different waking up in the morning and praying. I read aloud six or seven different devotional books, one of which is the Bible and ask the Lord to be with me that day.

Many people believe everything others say, even though what they see with their own eyes, should be enough to tell them otherwise.

Essentially my contribution was to introduce repetition into Western music as the main ingredient without any melody over it, without anything just repeated patterns, musical patterns.

Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.