Cinema Quotes

The longing for improvement and the fear of waste and worse - it is a pattern still with us, and maybe it speaks to the medium's essential marriage of light and dark, or as Mary Pickford put it in her autobiography (published in 1955), Sunshine and Shadow. Light and dark were the elements of film, and they had their chemistry in film's emulsion. They had a moral meaning, too. But not everyone appreciated that prospect, or credited how it might make your fortune.

~ David Thomson

Just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It’s so formulaic and unsurprising that you wouldn’t dare re-create it in a movie. All the critics would mock it. They’d all say the screenwriter was a hack who didn’t even try. This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend — movies can’t show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people.

~ Chuck Klosterman

In this business, until you're known as a monster, you're not a star

~ Bette Davis

Her first really great role, the one that cemented the “Jean Arthur character,” was as the wisecracking big-city reporter who eventually melts for country rube Gary Cooper in Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). It was the first of three terrific films for Capra: Jean played the down-to-earth daughter of an annoyingly wacky family in Capra’s rendition of Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You (1938), and she was another hard-boiled city gal won over by a starry-eyed yokel in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). “Jean Arthur is my favorite actress,” said Capra, who had successfully worked with Stanwyck, Colbert and Hepburn. “. . . push that neurotic girl . . . in front of the camera . . . and that whining mop would magically blossom into a warm, lovely, poised and confident actress.” Capra obviously recognized that Jean was often frustrated in her career choice.

~ Eve Golden

Stahl trailed him upstairs, across a mezzanine, and out into the darkness of the sloping balcony. Tom gave the aisle his torch so his guest could see. On the screen below a woman's head was wavering, two or three times larger than life. A metallic voice clanged out, echoing sepulchrally all over the house, like a modern Delphic Oracle. 'Go back, go back!' she said. 'This is no place for you!'Her big luminous eyes seemed to be looking right at Lew Stahl as she spoke. Her finger came out and pointed, and it seemed to aim straight at him and him alone. It was weird; he almost stopped in his tracks, then went on again. He hadn't eaten all day; he figured he must be woozy, to think things like that. (Dusk To Dawn)

~ Cornell Woolrich

I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from.

~ David Foster Wallace

For the casual viewer, Kurosawa’s films can be an exercise in endurance.

~ Jerry White

We didn't need sex. We had Tyrone Power.

~ Barbara Cartland

How speak about an art which no one recognizes as an art? I know that a great deal has already been written about the art of the cinema. One can read about it most every day in the newspapers & the magazines. But it is not the art of the cinema which you will find discussed therein--it is rather dire, botched embryo as it now stands revealed before our eyes, the still-birth which was mangled in the womb by the obstetricians of art.

~ Henry Miller

Moving provides meaning for our humble (if still vicious) life of four-dimensional existence. Four-dimensional existence makes the frightening fox hunt into an entertainment, or war into a pastime or a sport. Even when evil is dull and monotonous, there tends to be a lot of movement, action and entertainment involved. Maybe movies are evil.

~ Gus Van Sant

Dreams rise in the darkness and catch fire from the mirage of moving light. What happens on the screen isn't quite real; it leaves open a vague cloudy space for the poor, for dreams and the dead. Hurry hurry, cram yourself full of dreams to carry you through the life that's waiting for you outside, when you leave here, to help you last a few days more in that nightmare of things and people. Among the dreams, choose the ones most likely to warm your soul.

~ Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Filmmaking isn’t if you can just strap on a camera onto an actor, and steadicam, and point it at their face, and follow them through the movie, that is not what moviemaking is, that is not what it’s about. It’s not just about getting a performance. It’s also about the psychology of the cinematic moment, and the psychology of the presentation of that, of that window.

~ David Fincher

It’s hard to explain the fun to be found in seeing the right kind of bad movie.

~ Roger Ebert

Don't you go to the movies?Mostly just to eat popcorn in the dark.

~ Charles Bukowski

‏@BretEastonEllis 31 MarAfter watching the delirious Room 237 I realized that the worst thing happening to movies was the empowerment of the viewer via technology.

~ Bret Easton Ellis

In New York I'd go to the movies three or four times a week. Here I've upped it to six or seven, mainly because I'm too lazy to do anything else. Fortunately, going to the movies seems to suddenly qualify as an intellectual accomplishment, on a par with reading a book or devoting time to serious thought. It's not that the movies have gotten any more strenuous, it's just that a lot of people are as lazy as I am, and together we've agreed to lower the bar.

~ David Sedaris

The projector's beam lay warm on Walt's neck, and he knew they'd all been plucked from danger and love, from another time, another place, and set back into this dark, sticky-floored theater, in the heart of nothing much that mattered.

~ Alan Heathcock

My dreams kind of came through when I went to see the cinema.

~ Debbie Reynolds

To get noticed, I had to take my films in a space which was much more democratic in terms of cinema - the international film festivals.

~ Anurag Kashyap

The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death.

~ Jim Morrison

Cinema sustains life. It captures death in its progress.

~ Harmony Korine

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.

~ Martin Scorsese

Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.

~ Roman Polanski

A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan.

~ Mel Brooks

Cinema is a world of imagination.

~ Marjane Satrapi

I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be.

~ Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Cinema reflects culture and there is no harm in adapting technology, but not at the cost of losing your originality.

~ Jackie Chan

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.

~ Jean-Luc Godard

That's what I like about film-it can be bizarre, classic, normal, romantic. Cinema is to me the most versatile thing.

~ Catherine Deneuve

American cinema tends to express a patriotic relationship to national identity on a regular basis.

~ Tom Hooper

A visit to a cinema is a little outing in itself. It breaks the monotony of an afternoon or evening; it gives a change from the surroundings of home, however pleasant.

~ Ivor Novello