Cinema Quotes and Sayings
Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.
Jean-Luc Godard
The word “Action!” frees me – the transformation is something I cannot explain – too much analysis might destroy it.
Sophia Loren
Life is a tragedy when seen in close up, but a comedy in long shot.
Charles Chaplin
A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
Jean Cocteau
Acting: An art which consists of keeping the audience from coughing.
Ralph Richardson
All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
Jean-Luc Godard
The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.
Alfred Hitchcock
Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.
Roman Polanski
We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.
Walt Disney
There are only three ages for women in Hollywood – Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.
Goldie Hawn
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
Jessamyn West
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.
Jean-Luc Godard
If I made Cinderella, the audience would be looking out for a body in the coach.
Alfred Hitchcock
Several hard-core Star Wars fans who had tickets for the first showing actually said that when the movie finally began, they started crying. Mainly because they realized that it’s 22 years later, and they still haven’t lost their virginity.
Conan O’Brien
For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.
Alfred Hitchcock
The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.
Carl Gustav Jung
Of course all films are surrealist. They are making something that looks like the real world but isn’t.
Michael Powell
Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure. Besides, you can’t teach old fleas new dogs.
Federico Fellini
I let the audience use their imaginations. Can I help it if they misconstrue my suggestions?
Ernst Lubitsch
I came out here with one suit and everybody said I looked like a bum. Twenty years later Marlon Brando came out with only a sweatshirt and the town drooled over him. That shows how much Hollywood has progressed.
Humphrey Bogart
American cinema is international like the fairy tales were international.
Bernard Tavernier
What I’ve learned is that life is too short and movies are too long.
Denis Leary
Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera.
Jean-Luc Godard
I’ve spent several years in Hollywood, and I still think the movie heroes are in the audience.
Wilson Mizner
Forget the grand plan. Forget the master scheme. Forget control. That is the bleak but true basis of independent cinema. Inch by motherfuking inch we must, because we have no other choice.
Oliver Stone
Acting is like a Halloween mask that you put on.
River Phoenix
It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkies instead of the other way around.
Mary Pickford
The most difficult thing in the world is to start a career known only for your looks, and then to try to become a serious actress. No one will take you seriously once you are known as the pretty woman.
Penelope Cruz
It isn’t easy to do in the theatre, but it’s twice as hard in the film.
Arthur Miller
[M]ovie-making is the process of turning money into light. All they have at the end of the day is images flickering on a wall.
John Boorman
All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.
Charles Chaplin
If I find a film dull, I find it infinitely more entertaining to watch the scratches.
Norman McLaren
Never judge a book by its movie.
J.W. Eagan
Even if I set out to make a film of a fillet of sole, it would be about me.
Federico Fellini
There is no terror in a bang, only in the anticipation of it.
Alfred Hitchcock
This big store, they sell shoes and I make gloves.
Robert Altman
Sheer animated fantasy is still my first and deepest production impulse. The fable is the best storytelling device ever conceived, and the screen is its best medium.
Walt Disney
A sequel is an admission that you’ve been reduced to imitating yourself.
Don Marquis
Most horror movies are certainly that.
Brendan Francis
What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out.
Agnes Repplier
Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when they can stay home and see bad television for nothing?
Samuel Goldwyn
The trouble with a movie is that it’s old before it’s released. It’s no accident that it comes in a can.
Orson Welles
The chief difference between horror fans and science fiction fans lies in why they won’t walk backwards. A horror fan won’t walk backwards because he knows he’ll be knifed by a madman. A science fiction fan won’t walk backwards because he knows he’ll step on the cat.
Aaron Allston
It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkies instead of the other way around.
Mary Pickford
There’s no thief like a bad movie.
Sam Ewing
The saving grace of the cinema is that with patience, and a little love, we may arrive at that wonderfully complex creature which is called man.
Jean Renoir
The cinema is truth 24 frames per second.
Jean-Luc Godard