"Never judge a book by its movie."
— J.W. Eagan

"Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare."
— Alfred Hitchcock

"Is everybody in? Is everybody in? Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin. The entertainment for this evening is not new, you've seen this entertainment through and through you have seen your birth, your life, your death....you may recall all the rest. Did you have a good world when you died? -enough to base a movie on??"
— Jim Morrison (Jim Morrison's an American Prayer)

"All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun."
— Jean-Luc Godard

"The first step — especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money — the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it."
— Roger Ebert

"Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out"
— Martin Scorsese

"Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates."
— Werner Herzog

"Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons)

"ask for nothing and you shall recieve it in abundance"
— rocky horror picture show

"When everything gets answered, it's fake."
— Sean Penn

"Remember the great film with Bette Davis, All About Eve? There's a scene after the scheming Eve steals Margo's role through trickery & then gets this magnificent review. Margo of course is effing & blinding all over the place. And crying. Her director rushes into her house, puts his arms around her & says, "I ran all the way". That's what I want."
— Martha Grimes (Dust: A Richard Jury Mystery)

"Quantum physics is to regular everyday physics as a David Lynch film is to a mainstream blockbuster"
— S Peter Davis

"I pin my faith to that story which is a slice out of real life."
— Lois Weber

"Run mad as often as you choose...But do not faint."
— Mansfield Park

""I know the best moments can never be captured on film, even as I spend nearly half my life trying to do just that.""
— Rosie O'Donnell

"The traveling salesmen fed me pills that made the lining of my veins feel scraped out, my jaw ached... I knew every raindrop by its name, I sensed everything before it happened. Like I knew a certain oldsmobile would stop even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside, I knew we'd have an accident in the rain. I didn't care. They said they'd take me all the way."
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son: Stories)

"The gunfire around us makes it hard to hear. But the human voice is different from other sounds. It can be heard over noises that bury everything else. Even when it’s not shouting. Even when it’s just a whisper. Even the lowest whisper can be heard – over armies..when it’s telling the truth."
— Edmond Zuwanie, The Interpreter

"Tibby sat on the outside of a group of kids in the film program. There was a lot of dark clothing and heavy footwear, and quite a few piercings glinting in sunlight. They had invited her to sit with them while they all finished up their lunches before film seminar. Tibby knew that they had invited her largely because she had a ring in her nose. This bugged her almost as much as when people excluded her because she had a ring in her nose."
— Ann Brashares (The Second Summer of the Sisterhood)

"Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him."
— Orson Welles

"If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe."
— Werner Herzog

"No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out."
— Roger Ebert

"Film lovers are sick people."
— François Truffaut

"A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again."
— Jean Renoir

"ALPHA-60: Your name is written "Ivan Johnson," but it is pronounced "Lemmy Caution," Secret Agent Zero Zero Three of the Outlands. You are a threat to the security of Alphaville.

CAUTION: I refuse to become what you call "normal."

...

ALPHA-60: You cannot escape. The door is locked.

CAUTION: Try to stop me, pal."
— Jean-Luc Godard (Alphaville)

""Meanwhile it's got stormy, the tattered fog even thicker, chasing across my path. Three people are sitting in a glassy tourist cafe between clouds and clouds, protected by glass from all sides. Since I don't see any waiters, it crosses my mind that corpses have been sitting there for weeks, statuesque. All this time the cafe has been unattended, for sure. Just how long have they been sitting here, petrified like this?" "
— Werner Herzog (Of Walking in Ice)

"It's tough, man. Unless it's a tentpole, sequel, remake, or over-the-top comedy, that's all the studios are even doing. They've kind of admitted they're not in the business of doing anything else. The slightest level of irony or intelligence and, boom, you're out of the league, you're done."
— Richard Linklater

"It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defenses and really break your heart."
— David Gilmour

"What we see, and what we seem, are but a dream, a dream within a dream."
— Miranda's voiceover in Picnic at Hanging Rock

"What I remember myself from films, and what I love about films, is specific scenes and characters."
— Harmony Korine

"After 100 years, films should be getting really complicated. The novel has been reborn about 400 times, but it's like cinema is stuck in the birth canal."
— Harmony Korine

"If Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the Great Art Form would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about."
— Harmony Korine

"Ever director has at least 10 bad films in them."
— Robert Rodriguez (Rebel Without a Crew)

"We all steal, but if we're smart we steal from great directors. Then, we can call it influence.
"
— Krzysztof Kieślowski

"I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself."
— Peter Greenaway

"The dangerous temptation of wildlife films is that they can lull us into thinking we can get by without the original models -- that we might not need animals in the flesh."
— Doug Peacock (Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness)

"Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them."
— Pauline Kael