Alexander Payne

“I thank you for this award, though I think there may be a problem with a world in which making small, human and humorous films is ‘an achievement.’ It should be the norm.”

Akira Kurosawa

“Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied...that's why they can keep on working. I've been able to work for so long because I think next time, I'll make something good.”

Todd Field

Fritz Lang

“I should say that I was a visual person. I experience with my eyes and never, or rarely, with my ears...to my constant regret.”

Billy Wilder

“If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.”

Sidney Lumet

“All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.”

Alfonso Cuarón

“The only reason you make a movie is not to make or set out to do a good or bad movie, it's just to see what you learn for the next one.”

Claude Berri

“I try to make films that move people when they are in the theater and make them think only after they leave.”

Danny Boyle

“There's a certain truth that you do end up making the same film again and again so if you vary the genre you have a chance of breaking that cycle.”

Jean Renoir

“A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.”

Carol Reed

“I give the public what I like, and hope they will like it too.”

Robert Bresson

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”

Stanley Kubrick

“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.”

Charles Burnett

“The impetus was the whole Civil Rights Movement and we felt we had a responsibility to reflect reality, tell the truth about the black community. To help, however we can, to march the social movement forward.”

Woody Allen

“Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.”

Charlie Chaplin

“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

Ingmar Bergman

“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”

Oscar Micheaux