The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

An artist must either give up art or develop.

Trash has given us an appetite for art.

[About 20 years ago, upon seeing him in] Street Smart, … Is Morgan Freeman America’s best actor?

Her only flair is in her nostrils.

A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not...

Just about the best Hollywood musical of all time.

Brando represented a reaction against the postwar mania for security. As a protagonist, the Brando of the early 50’s had no code, only his instincts. He was a development from the gangster and the outlaw.

A guy gets shot with a penis.

Really, it’s not people who don’t understand us who drive us nuts—it’s when those who shouldn’t, do.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society...

The unwary Brando was made to look public ass No. 1. It was now open season on Brando.

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

The words “”Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”” which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies

Where there is a will, there is a way. If there is a chance in a million that you can do something, anything, to keep what you want from ending, do it. Pry the door...

The worst thing about movie-making is that it’s like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.

In this country we encourage “”creativity”” among the mediocre, but real bursting creativity appalls us. We put it down as undisciplined, as somehow “”too much.””

The words “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies

…When the bespangled Miss Charisse wraps her phenomenal legs around [Fred] Astaire, she can be forgiven everything—even the fact that she reads her lines as if she learned them phonetically.

says Lopez. ”They’re right near where I live; and they have such a great film program over there it seemed a perfect place for it.

In this country we encourage “creativity” among the mediocre, but real bursting creativity appalls us. We put it down as undisciplined, as somehow “too much.”

Trash has given us an appetite for art

Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Watching old movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us, and we wouldn’t go out of our way to see them; we drop in on them because they’re so...

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

The words ”Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what...

Kevin Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head. The Indians should have called him ‘Plays with Camera.

This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.

It seems likely that many of the young who don’t wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don’t have the patience to make art.

One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.

A mistake in judgment isn’t fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is

The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the...

The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.

we are left with the career novelists.