I did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay. It was probably harder for a regular director. He probably had to read the script the night before shooting started.

I suppose they're like the I.R.S. You move once and they never send you your refund check.

I did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay. It was probably harder for a regular director. He probably had to read the script the night before shooting started.

You can't go around the theatres handing out cards saying, 'It isn't my fault'. You go onto the next one.

According to my mother, positively no one, least of all herself, had even the faintest suspicion that she was heavy with child at the time of my birth.

Despite my express wish, I was not left in Chicago, but taken to Paris to live, and I did not see my father for many years. But we never stopped loving each other, and in 1940 he died in my arms in Hollywood, where he had come to be near me at the end.

For a southern belle, my grandmother was remarkably modern. She threw my grandfather out, for one thing - some kind of argument about bourbon whiskey - shortly after the birth of their third child, and then went back to school to get herself a teaching certificate.

How many years and how many pictures does it take to win the confidence of Paramount? How many years before my fellow workers say, 'I know he is doing his best?'

I always was and always will be optimistic.

I am quite sure that a little man who braves ridicule to improve the lot of his fellow men, and is thanked by their jibes, is an interesting character.

I am, of course, directly descended from Brian Boru, the last king of Ireland, a fact certified by my mother and therefore beyond dispute. But as everybody else with a drop of Irish blood in his carcass is also a guaranteed descendant of the old billy goat, I am not overly arrogant because of this royal strain.

I compared pooh-poohers of the movies to the myopics who used to holler, 'Get a horse!' when an early automobile exploded by.

I did not think that a good movie was the equivalent of a good stage play, any more than I thought an automobile ride was as exhilarating as a drive behind a spirited horse, nor a trip by steam as soul-satisfying as a voyage by sail.

I don't believe environment has the slightest bit to do with anything - I only believe in ancestral influence. It would have made no difference whether I'd been brought up in a reform school, or on the island of Lesbos.

I go through life accumulating possessions... I've always done it... and then, every once in a while, a sort of tidal wave comes along and washes them all away.

I thought for a month or so along the lines of what I call Monsieur Beaucaire in modern clothes. By that, I mean a hero who is believed by all to be a villain but who, in the end, is introduced as a man of great honor with a long list of decorations.

I worked out a rather deep-dish theory defining the theater as a form of architecture rather than a form of literature.

If I can't find real situations that interest me in real life, then I'll go and write them in play form.

If war is the solution, why didn't Roosevelt declare war on poverty?

It is probably a very good thing for a boy to learn to live with enmity, as opposed to an atmosphere of love and affection, as it hardens him and gives him a taste of what he is going to run into later in life.

Of the Sturges family, much more is known than is available about poor Irish immigrants and obscure Scottish-English settlers around Rochester.

Our gymnasium was remarkable and had more stuff in it than one could dream up in a nightmare. Furthermore, every boy had to use every piece of it during gymnasium class.

Paris Singer had vastly more to do with shaping my character than Mother had; although Mother made innumerable sacrifices for me, and Paris Singer made none. I wanted to be like him.

The United States owes a great debt to its inventors. Far from being grateful to them, it places every obstruction in their way and makes it enormously difficult to secure a patent.

The more nearly the film cutter approaches the natural law of interest, the more invisible will be his cutting. If the camera moves from one person to another at the exact moment that you in the legitimate theatre would have turned your head, you will not be conscious of a cut.

The more you stand in the limelight, the more scarred you will become and the more you will love the limelight.

Theater in which you eat is the oldest form of theater.

Though I believe in God, I don't believe in religion for everybody. Some people who are a little weak and don't want to shoulder any responsibility need Catholicism. For people at the other extreme, there is Christian Science... I think a powerful conscience is worth all the religions put together.

I sometimes lie awake at night trying to think of something funny that Richard Nixon said.

To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.

I'm looking forward to providing the men of Seattle with an evening where they can kick back, light up a cigar and enjoy a night to themselves. Women, we can't technically keep you out, but please stay at home.

Prayer: the key of the day and the lock of the night.

I knew that my staying up would not change the election result if I were defeated, while if elected I had a hard day ahead of me. So I thought a night's rest was best in any event.

Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.

You know, nobody eats in England. Three or four pints of English beer a night fills you. I can't say I'm very impressed with the food in America. it's all sort of bland. Like turkey sandwiches.

I wanted to do an episode about Chuck having a gambling problem. I wanted to portray my addiction on the show. But I think it's a little edgy for Saturday night.

What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?

On that road of the informer, it is always night. I cannot ever inform against anyone without feeling something die within me. I inform without pleasure, because it is necessary.

We did a different show every night. We'd open a show, and then two weeks later we'd open the next show. And two weeks later we'd open the third show until we had all eight running. And it was just one of the richest experiences I'd ever had in my theatrical life.

I hate leaving home. I love what I do, but I'd love to go home every night.

I was babysitting the night High School Musical premiered last year. I watched with the kids and we sang along to the lyrics. I was making $12 an hour.

The name Air Supply sort of came from nowhere. I get a lot of my things in dreams and I just had a dream about it one night, and I woke up and said that's just got to be the name. That was in 1975.

I have never had problems sleeping the night before a race.

When my mother died, I had to go on air that night and do jokes.

And Big Night, I think by the end the brothers find that balance, when they touch each other on the shoulder over breakfast and it's understood that what should never have driven them apart almost drove them apart. I think that's a true moment.

I couldn't sleep one night and I was sitting in my office and I realized that I was an independent filmmaker.

Leisure time is that five or six hours when you sleep at night.

When I got old enough to go to night clubs to hear that music at the age of 15.

I was up until all hours of the night, listening to stories, meeting great old comedians.