I hardly said a word to my wife until I said 'yes' to divorce.

No, you're either born a writer, a storyteller, or you're not.

I became a loner. I became a mountain man. A lot of those things are very good qualities and they help you do your work, help you be singular and keep the artistic integrity of your work intact, but they don't make it very easy to live your life.

I've always been able to survive by writing, though.

There is a certain kind of respect for authenticity today that there wasn't back in the days when they did 'Cleopatra,' where everything looked like a giant motel. People want to have it be authentic in the look, and authentic in the way people behave.

I find that screenwriting is at best kind of a hackwork in some ways.

I've always had trouble with authority.

Yeah, I think that's it... It's like Jesse James. He became really popular because he lasted so long. You know, there is some degree of truth to the fact that time will dignify anything, too.

Most artists think they're frauds anyway.

Egotism is not a good quality. It's not something to be admired or even tolerated. It wouldn't be tolerated in a field commander and it shouldn't be tolerated in a movie director.

Yeah, there's absolutely. I mean, remember when The Searchers came out, it was a relatively big hit for a Western, and I think it made 5 million bucks - I don't even think it made that.

I felt that the Star Wars series became very pretentious as time went on. Just heavy and leaden.

I suppose when I started out I would have liked to have been the darling of critics or something, but everybody wants to be loved and admired.

I think Francis at half form is better than anybody else by 50%, you know? I think it's just that he has never... he has a late pick of the things that are ambitious enough for him.

You never know when you're going to be considered un-hip... The people that really pass judgment on you really have nothing to do with what you do, usually.

Everybody's a filmmaker today.

Most of the good executives do pretty well. Because to be a good executive you have to be strong, and you have to have a simple attribute that people have forgotten about - courage.

Writing requires a great deal of skill, just like painting does. People don't want to learn those skills.

I hardly said a word to my wife until I said 'yes' to divorce.

Also, they don't understand - writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language.

'm a general, I do something. I go out and fight wars and win them.

A lot of directors don't know what they want to do. Every director I've seen that was a good director that I've admired knew exactly what he wanted to do. They didn't sit there and think about it.

Matter of fact, the style that people use today, I invented in a way.

I also thought of myself as the Sonny Barger of the film industry.

A lot of people thought of me as a threat to Western civilization.

You know, I find it very strange when movies that I made that were just excoriated - I mean that I was just vilified for - are now looked at as classics.

The filmmakers always have a great level of control.

Films are always pretentious. There's nothing more pretentious than a filmmaker.

I mean, the old film critics just excoriated me.

I suppose when I started out I would have liked to have been the darling of critics or something but everybody wants to be loved and admired.

Films are always pretentious. Theres nothing more pretentious than a filmmaker.

I hate failure and that divorce was a Number One failure in my eyes. It was the worst period of my life. Neither Desi nor I have been the same since, physically or mentally.

I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you.

Please do not ask me to talk about my divorce. Mr. Ziegfeld and I are such very good friends. It is only a little matter quite between ourselves.

Divorce is the psychological equivalent of a triple coronary bypass.

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

There's nothing like a family crisis, especially a divorce, to force a person to re-evaluate his life.

Anybody who's been through a divorce will tell you that at one point. they've thought murder. The line between thinking murder and doing murder isn't that major.

I'm not saying that people should not divorce, but at the rate at which it happens here is sick. The kids, they suffer. I don't care what anyone says.

With The Key, it was, I had gone through a divorce and losing my father, and just kinda really reminiscing about how much I loved the traditional side of country music, so I made a record that was really traditional from start to finish.

Sometimes divorce is better than marriage.

To get over my divorce, I got a prescription to live at the Playboy Mansion for a while.

The day I initiated divorce proceedings against Michael Farmer, I was ready to retire to a desert cave and rethink my life.

Peace, of course, is different from divorce; indeed, in essential respects, divorce is the opposite of peace.

My parent's divorce and hard times at school, all those things combined to mold me, to make me grow up quicker. And it gave me the drive to pursue my dreams that I wouldn't necessarily have had otherwise.

As soon as she gets her divorce one of us is going to marry her. We don't know which. She is about as beautiful a woman as I ever saw, and very witty and well-informed, but it would cost a good deal to keep her in diamonds.

I believe I went through a divorce. My relationship with Ellen is no less significant as a marriage than my relationship to Coley.

The possibility of divorce renders both marriage partners stricter in their observance of the duties they owe to each other. Divorces help to improve morals and to increase the population.