Quotes

The movie is a reflector and not an innovator.

In Hollywood, you're a veteran if you've had a job of more than six weeks' tenure with one company.

[on the rating of films] I don't know any other business that tells you not to go in and buy their product.

[on Oliver Stone's JFK (1991)] This was a package of unfathomable lies, packed together though with a cinema artist's great skill. It was a blending and a millage of real photographs and fictional scenes and merged together with such skill that you were unable to tell the difference.

I never fathomed James Joyce.

Getting Cary Grant to pick up the restaurant check was a miracle few had ever witnessed.

The professional does his job right every time, without regard for anything else.

If I hunker down, as LBJ used to say, like a jackass in a hailstorm and wait till the storm passes, it's going to be all right. If I look down on a day or two, I know on the third day I'm gonna start rising again.

[on the Vietnam War] There's nothing more brutalizing than to order men into battle and then pick up the phone from the Pentagon and find out how many were lost that day. I once asked [President] Johnson 'how do you stand it?'. And he said it was like drinking carbolic acid every morning. When he couldn't sleep, he would wander the White House with a flashlight, visiting the portrait of Woodrow Wilson who had been paralyzed by a stroke while in office. Or he would go the the Situation Room at 3 a.m. because there would always be people there with the latest news and body counts.