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My movies were the kind they show in prisons and airplanes, because nobody can leave.
-Burt Reynolds
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In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write, but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing.
-Will Rogers
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There's only one thing that can kill the movies, and that's education.
-Will Rogers
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There is no more interesting place in the world to meet characters than a movie set. If you have lost anybody anywhere and don
-Will Rogers
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Does art reflect life? In movies, yes. Because more than any other art form, films have been a mirror held up to society's porous face.
-Marjorie Rosen
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It doesn't work if the bad guys kill his mother's uncle's friend's neighbor's pet dog. You've got to make the stakes high. Explaining why the hero's woman must get shot
-Steven Seagal
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I didn't go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer.
-Sam Shepard
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Some years ago, writing about stage adaptations of fiction, I noted:
-John Simon
Movies Into Film, Dial (1971)
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In the beginning, all I wanted to do was to be a singer and a dancer. That was my real groove, my real interest. When it came to doing films, my biggest goal was to do a commercial.
-Wesley Snipes
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In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
-Susan Sontag
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One of the joys of going to the movies was that it was trashy, and we should never lose that.
-Oliver Stone
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Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.
-Igor Stravinsky
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Mayakovsky has an essay called How to Write Poems where he says that a poet must spend time and effort choosing the uniquely appropriate words, force them into the rhythm of the poem and then test it out loud ten times or more. Vertov did something very similar at the editing table. A hundred tests, a thousand different variants, endless numbers of try-outs--for meaning, for imagery, for rhythm--and finally, after long intensive efforts, that feeling of joy: it works. . .
-Elizaveta Svilova
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The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.
-James Thurber, The New York Times, February 21, 1960
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It's hard to make a cultural phenomenon every time.
-John Travolta
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All film directors, whether famous or obscure, regard themselves as misunderstood or underrated. Because of that, they all lie. They're obliged to overstate their own importance.
-Francois Truffaut
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The greatest films are those which show how society shapes man. The greatest plays are those which show how man shapes society.
-Kenneth Tynan
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I am the camera's eye. I am the machine that shows you the world as I alone see it. Starting from today I am forevcr free of human immobility. I am in perpetual movement. I approach and draw away from things--I crawl under them--I climb on them--I am on the head of a galloping horse
-Dziga Vertov
source indicated: Published in Mayakovsky's LET Magazine, 1918
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People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen to you in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television -- you don't feel anything.
-Andy Warhol
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A film is never really any good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
-Orson Welles
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I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it -- yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don't give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.
-Orson Welles
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The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to be the audience and to select from what happens during the day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala night. His job is to preside over accidents.
-Orson Welles
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A strange thing has happened -- while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.
-Virginia Woolf
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The films of The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar always seemed to me mere thin skims of the story lines, and I never did see a meager Hollywood caper called Youngblood Hawke, vaguely based on my 800-page novel. So it was that I opted for television, with its much broader time limits, for The Winds of War.''
-Herman Wouk
(interview)
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Books about Film / Filmmaking / Movies
