Agnieszka Holland

“His penis saved his soul. Otherwise, he might have become a total Nazi.” (on Europa Europa protagonist Solomon Perel, a circumcised Jew who posed as an “Aryan” German during World War II to escape persecution)

Bob Rafelson

“If it happens that people respond to your work in your lifetime, well, you’re very lucky. In some way it gives you permission to go on making movies. But if you don’t get the applause, well, there are other things. I mean, after all, there’s your life to live.”

Brad Bird

“We make films that we ourselves would want to see and then hope that other people would want to see it. If you try to analyze audiences or think there's some sophisticated recipe for success, then I think you are doomed. You're making it too complicated.”

Neil LaBute

István Szabó

“I don’t think that you can separate art and politics because politics is life, and if you separate art and politics it means that art has nothing to do with life.”

Julian Schnabel

“Some people must go to extremes to get the world in balance for themselves. Some can't bear bright lights, so wherever they go they search for the dark; they turn the lights down, anything to sustain some level of comfort.”

Claude Chabrol

“A woman confronting men is a proper subject, it is inexhaustible.”

J.J. Abrams

“Especially in television, the more that you’re telling a story about a family, the better the show ends up being. And the family can be a family, a group of friends or the members of a starship. You’re telling the story of relationships and how characters grow.”

Michael Curtiz

“The only things you regret are the things you don't do.”

Howard Hawks

“I'm a storyteller—that's the chief function of a director. And they're moving pictures, let's make 'em move!”

Judd Apatow

“It's so difficult to shock America these days.”

Quentin Tarantino

“I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.”

Alfred Hitchcock

“For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.”

Wes Anderson

“I know that feeling of looking back and thinking, that part I'd like to fix. So I obsessively try not to compromise.”