Well, I’d say that the minute sound came in, it was everybody talking their heads off and going for dialogue laughs. All your writers did the same thing. Once that started, it took years to...

No man can be a genius in slapshoes and a flat hat.

Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.

They say pantomime’s a lost art. It’s never been a lost art and never will be, because it’s too natural to do.

I’ve simply been brought up being knocked down.

Everybody at Metro was in my gag department, including Irving Thalberg. They’d laugh their heads off at dialogue written by all your new writers. They were joke-happy. They didn’t look for action; they were looking...

The camera can’t catch my blushes!

I’m so sorry I fell down.

We didn’t stick to any format. We would just get an idea, and once you started on the idea it would lend itself to gags and natural trouble of any kind. There was no format.

Is Hollywood the cruelest city in the world? Well, it can be. New York can be that, too. You can be a Broadway star here one night, and something happens, and out–nobody knows you on...

When sound came, we found this out–we found this out from our own pictures–that sound didn’t bother us at all. There was only one thing I wanted at all times, and insisted on: that you...

I don’t act, anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind.

You could write the whole plot on a postcard. We do the rest.

It was an event when you could get all three of them on the set at the same time. The minute you started a picture with the Marx brothers you hired three assistant directors. One...

From the time I was 7 or 8 years old, we were the roughest knockabout act that ever was in the history of the theater, not only in the United States but all over Europe...

The first thing I did in the studio was to want to tear that camera to pieces. I had to know how that film got into the cutting room, what you did to it in...

Think slow, act fast.

Life is too serious to do farce comedy.