[about the Hotel Marmont on Sunset Blvd., a piece of Hollywood history] I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.

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.

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.

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.

But every day I go to work I'm making a bet that the universe is simple, symmetric, and aesthetically pleasing—a universe that we humans, with our limited perspective, will someday understand.

Wherever this is light, look for the shadow. The shadow is me.

It’s what you sow that multiplies, not what you keep in the barn.

Uninvited guests seldom meet a welcome.

Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose.

The end is low, like all quantitative ends, personal or not, and it can be attained and verified.

Would PBS go so far as to give air time to an even more extreme kind of disinformer, a Holocaust denier?

How protean are the devices available to human intelligence when it lends itself to the persistence of the conformist error.

I like to think of myself as a 'live life to its fullest' type of guy.

An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.