I am fascinated with times past.

I am fascinated with times past.

I think once you've finished a movie you really have to detach from it so that you can come back and watch it as an audience member.

I think a story should take as long to tell as it is appropriate to that particular story.

Visual storytelling of one kind or another has been around since cavemen were drawing on the walls.

And I don't think I'm giving away any secrets here, but there are a lot of terrible scripts in this town.

To me, length is an artificial and arbitrary factor in a film.

Boy, I'd hate to shoot on tape or disc or whatever the hell they're talking about. I love film.

A director shouldn't get in the way of the movie, the story should.

Some of us have great original ideas and some of us depend on adaptations.

'The Exorcist' is amazing because it recognizes that silences can be as powerful as sound effects.

I spent 20 years of my career primarily being a writer for hire.

I'd like to think that my films are personal enough to exist without hearkening back to their respective novels.

One of my favorite movies of all time is 'It's A Wonderful Life,' which is a pretty interesting choice for a seasonal Christmas favorite, because it's about a guy who wants to commit suicide and is presented with reasons not to.

Stanley Kubrick was a big inspiration. People accuse me of never using my own material. But when did Kubrick? You look at his films and they are completely unique... completely separate entities.

The human race is fundamentally insane. If you put two of us into a room together, we're soon gonna start figuring out good reasons to kill one another.

The only person who can, with impunity, make the movie he wants to make, has got to be Steven Spielberg.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Although Alchemy has now fallen into contempt, and is even considered a thing of the past, the physicain should not be influenced by such judgements.

I do like to drive fast and I have gotten pulled over in the past. I use my skills to get out of tickets.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

The best prophet of the future is the past.

Some of the best lessons we ever learn are learned from past mistakes. The error of the past is the wisdom and success of the future.

Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it.

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

Terrorism, ladies and gentlemen, in my eyes I have a very, very, very simple explanation. Gangs of criminals, killers, used unfortunately by certain governments in the past for political purposes, who are on their own now as gangs.

In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.

By this time it was past six, and the enemy's van and ours were at too great a distance to engage, I perceived some of their ships stretching to the northward; and I imagined they were going to form a new line.

Firms would be given initial entitlements to gross markup on the basis of past performance. These entitlements would be transferable and a market in them would be developed.

I mean that at least 80% of the Russian people feel destitute. It's the people who had their past and future taken from them - they don't get paid - many of them face a wall. They have nowhere to go.

They spend their time looking forward to the past.

Like most of those who study history, he (Napoleon III) learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

It also allows you to look as though you're not particularly from the present, future or past, either.

The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.

Yes, romance has found it's way into my heart in the past.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.

In the past I've made movies that were pretty universally liked. You can't really hate them. You can discard them, but you can't really hate them.

No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.

And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.

Parents are like shuttles on a loom. They join the threads of the past with threads of the future and leave their own bright patterns as they go.

I'm not here to discuss the past... I'm here to be positive.

I have to say that it's very few countries that are willing to look back at its past and apologize for its act, or make amends for its act, as the United States had one.

Which is not to discount everything I've done in my past; everything I have learned tremendously from.

In the past, people were born royal. Nowadays, royalty comes from what you do.

Using the power of decision gives you the capacity to get past any excuse to change any and every part of your life in an instant.