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Cinema is a magical ribbon of dream

• Movie-making is the process of turning money into light. All they have at the end of the day is images flickering on a wall.  John Boorman
• The cinema has no boundaries. It is a ribbon of dreams. Orson Welles
• I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians. Francis Ford Coppola
• Dreams,  Life is God’s movie,  Watch less television

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Movies can greatly move us

• Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls. Ingmar Bergman
• Certain things leave you in your life and certain things stay with you. And that’s why we’re all interested in movies- those ones that make you feel, you still think about. Because it gave you such an emotional response, it’s actually part of your emotional make-up, in a way. Tim Burton

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Movies can make us feel alive and believe in possibilities

• A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. Pauline Kael
• Possibility,  Aliveness

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Movies can sustain us and create meaning

• The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed. Stanley Kubrick
• Books and movies, they are not mere entertainment. They sustain me and help me cope with my real life. Arlaina Tibensky
• Movies are something people see all over the world because there is a certain need for it. Wim Wenders
• Meaning

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Movies connect us to others

• The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. Pauline Kael
• Connection

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Movies can teach us many things

• Everything I learned I learned from the movies. Audrey Hepburn
• Learning

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Movies provide rich, exciting experiences while keeping us safe

• The cinema, like the detective story, enables us to experience without danger to ourselves all the excitements, passions, and fantasies which have to be repressed in a humanistic age. Carl Jung
• Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe. John Updike

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Movies provide great variety and pleasure

• 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
• That’s what I like about film – it can be bizarre, classic, normal, romantic. Cinema is to me the most versatile thing. Catherine Deneuve
• Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure. Federico Fellini
• Variety,  Pleasure

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Movies are accessible and democratic and can even change the world

• Film is incredibly democratic and accessible, it’s probably the best option if you actually want to change the world, not just re-decorate it. Banksy
• Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music. Frank Capra

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Cinema is an art form that is available to everyone

• Every single art form is involved in film, in a way. Sydney Pollack
• Movies are an art form that is very available to the masses. Richard King
• The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t. Jean-Luc Godard
• Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. Ingmar Bergman
• Art depends on luck and talent. Francis Ford Coppola
• The enemy of art is the absence of limitations. Orson Welles
• Movies are immortal art – the first new art since Greek drama. Eric Johnston
  Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness. Ingmar Bergman
• Art

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Cinema is a mirror held up to society and the world …

• Does art reflect life? In movies, yes. Because more than any other art form, films have been a mirror held up to society’s porous face. Marjorie Rosen
• Although for some people cinema means something superficial and glamorous, it is something else. I think it is the mirror of the world. Jeanne Moreau

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… and the movies we love are a reflection of us

• The movies we love and admire are to some extent a function of who we are when we see them. Mary Schmich

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Film making is about story telling

• People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning. Steven Spielberg
• A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end… but not necessarily in that order. Jean-Luc Godard
• I like it when somebody tells me a story, and I actually really feel that that’s becoming like a lost art in American cinema. Quentin Tarantino
• Stories

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Life itself is like a movie …

• Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? Is not life one?  Augustus William
• The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn’t. Joseph L. Mankiewicz
• Life is like a B-Grade movie. You don’t want to leave in the middle, but you don’t want to see it again. Ted Turner
• Life is the movie you see through your own eyes. It makes little difference what’s happening out there. It’s how you take it that counts. Denis Waitley

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… a movie that you write, direct and star in …

• Be your own hero, it’s cheaper than a movie ticket. Douglas Horton
• Your life experience is a moving picture, of which you are writer, director, performer, producer and critic. F. Hodge
• Life’s like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending. Jim Henson
• You are the executive director and screenwriter of your life. Eric Thomas
• All of us together are making up a big play called “Life.” We each get to choose the role we will play and even write our parts of the script, which will be influenced by and have influence on many other players and their scripts. What part do you wish to play? What is the script you wish to write? Alan Seale
• You are writing the movie script of your life. Danielle LaPorte
• You must define your own life. Don’t let other people write your script. Oprah Winfrey
• Your life is a movie written by, directed by, produced by, and starring—you guessed it—YOU! We are all self- made. It is vital that we control our minds in order to re- create our lives. Will Bowen
• The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn’t. Joseph Mankiewicz
• Being the author of your life story

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… or a movie you arrive at late and don’t have a clue as to its plot

• The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues. Terry Pratchett
• Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends. Joseph Campbell

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Thoughts on good movies

• Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater. Roman Polanski
• Every great film should seem new every time you see it. Roger Ebert
• A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it. Alfred Hitchcock
• In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret. Susan Sonrag
• I want people to leave the cinema feeling that something’s been confirmed for them about life. Danny Boyle
• If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on. Alfred Hitchcock
• A film is never really any good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet. Orson Welles

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Thoughts on bad movies

• There’s no thief like a bad movie. Sam Ewing
• If I find a film dull, I find it infinitely more entertaining to watch the scratches. Norman McLaren
• There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness. Frank Capra
• Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when they can stay home and see bad television for nothing? Samuel Goldwyn
• When everything gets answered, it’s fake. Sean Penn
• An epic is the easiest kind of picture to make badly. Fred R. Barnard
• A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad. Samuel Goldwyn

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Thoughts on movies based on books

• Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. John LeCarre
• Never judge a book by its movie. W. Eagan
• Compared to a novel, a film is like an economy pizza where there are no olives, no ham, no anchovies, no mushrooms, and all you’ve got is the dough. Louis de Bernières
• Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. John LeCarre
• A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit. Graham Greene
• Books

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Thoughts on sex in movies

• What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films. Billy Wilder
• If you suck on a tit the movie gets an R rating. If you hack the tit off with an axe it will be PG. Jack Nicholson
• In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God. Orson Welles
• My reaction to porno films is as follows; After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw, After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live. Erica Jong
• I really think that sex always looks kind of funny in a movie. William Friedkin
• Sexuality,  Pornography

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Thoughts on CGI

• This CGI bullshit is the death knell of cinema. If I’d wanted all that computer game bullshit, I’d have stuck my dick in a Nintendo. Quentin Tarantino

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Thoughts on sequels

• A sequel is an admission that you’ve been reduced to imitating yourself. Don Marquis

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Thoughts on drama

• A drama is life with dull bits cut out. Alfred Hitchcock

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Thoughts on horror

• Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare. Alfred Hitchcock
• If you watch a scary movie together, then the scariness is cut in half! Hidekaz Himaruya
• Most horror movies are certainly that. Brendan Francis

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Thoughts on westerns

• I wouldn’t say when you’ve seen one Western you’ve seen the lot; but when you’ve seen the lot you get the feeling you’ve seen one. Katharine Whitehorn

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Thoughts on directors and directing

• A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again. Jean Renoir
• Casting is 65 percent of directing. John Frankenheimer
• (When asked what a director does) I help. Krzysztof Kieslowski
• A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard. Billy Wilder
• The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it. John Huston

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Thoughts on editing

• Editing feels almost like sculpting or a form of continuing the writing process. Sydney Pollack
• The essence of cinema is editing. It’s the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy. Francis Ford Coppola

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Thoughts on screenplays and script writing

• I always say a screenplay is the big plain pizza, the one with tomatoes and cheese. And then the director comes and says, “You know, it needs some mushrooms.” And you go, “Put mushrooms on it.” And then the costume designer throws peppers on it, and – and pretty soon, you have a pizza with everything on it. And sometimes it’s the greatest pizza of your life and sometimes you think, “Well, that was a mistake. We should have left it with only the mushrooms. Nora Ephron
• Scriptwriting for film is the toughest part of the whole racket . . . the least understood and the least noticed. Frank Capra quotes
• A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue. David Mamet
• The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn’t. Joseph L. Mankiewicz

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Thoughts on cinema, reality and fiction

• People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen to you in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it’s like watching television — you don’t feel anything. Andy Warhol
• Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. Jessamyn West
• It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen. Anthony Burgess
• The secret to film is that it’s an illusion. George Lucas
• Reality,  Fantasy

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Thoughts on cinema and truth

• Photography is truth. And cinema is truth twenty-four times a second. Jean-Luc Godard
• Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world. Jean-Luc Godard
• Truth

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Thoughts on acting and being an actor

• One of the nice things about acting is that it allows you to open up to the other people within you. David Duchovny
• The word “Action!” frees me – the transformation is something I cannot explain – too much analysis might destroy it. Sophia Loren
• Acting: An art which consists of keeping the audience from coughing.  Ralph Richardson
• I don’t want people to know what I’m actually like. It’s not good for an actor. Jack Nicholson
• Once you’ve been really bad in a movie, there’s a certain kind of fearlessness you develop. Jack Nicholson

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Thoughts on the problem with movies today

• The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution form the audience but a mouthful of popcorn. Raymond Chandler
• I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas. Jean-Luc Godard
• American motion pictures are written by the half-educated for the half-witted. John Ervine
• All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish. Clive  James
• Cinema is still a very young art form with extraordinary techniques and very impressive special effects but sometimes it seems the soul has been taken out of things. Catherine Deneuve
• I like it when somebody tells me a story, and I actually really feel that that’s becoming like a lost art in American cinema. Quentin Tarantino
• Films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement – they offer not drama but thrills. David Mamet

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Advice for filmmakers

• But having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, sciences – is very, very important to actually being able to make movies. George Lucas
• Our feeling is that the most important thing on a set is that actors have enough confidence to try different things. If there’s stress or tension, they won’t go out on a limb because they won’t want to embarrass themselves if they don’t feel completely comfortable. Peter Farrelly
• I think one of the privileges of being a filmmaker is the opportunity to remain a kind of perpetual student. Edward Zwick
• I made it for myself – it was a film I wanted to see. Donna Deitch
• I make movies I want to see. Neil LaBute
• My advice to young film-makers is this: Don’t follow trends, Start them! Frank Capra
• I steal from every movie ever made. Quentin Tarantino
• Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms. Alfred Hitchcock
• I always believe it’s better to have 30 imaginations working on a project, rather than one imagination telling the other 29 what to do. Trevor Nunn
• I don’t try to guess what a million people will like. It’s hard enough to know what I like. John Huston

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Thoughts from filmmakers

• When you start you want to make the greatest film in the world, but when you get into it, you just want to get it done, let it be passable and not embarrassing. Francis Ford Coppola
• It’s all just one film to me. Just different chapters. Robert Altman
• I think audiences get too comfortable and familiar in today’s movies. They believe everything they’re hearing and seeing. I like to shake that up. Christopher Nolan
• A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later. Stanley Kubrick
• My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water. Robert Bresson
• I want people to leave the cinema feeling that something’s been confirmed for them about life. Danny Boyle
• If my films make one more person miserable, I’ll feel I have done my job. Woody Allen
• Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage. Charlie Chaplin
• The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them. Alfred Hitchcock
• If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right. Woody Allen
• When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea. Sydney Pollack
• Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out. Martin Scorsese
• My films are therapy for my debilitating depression. In institutions people weave baskets. I make films. Woody Allen
• For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake. Alfred Hitchcock

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All you need to make a movie …

• All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl. Charles Chaplin
• All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. Jean-Luc Godard

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More thoughts on cinema

• There are films and television series that have expertly explored dark matter while stopping short of bathing in it for titillation: those, I applaud. Jenny McCartney
• Movie making is the slowest business on earth next to fossil manufacture. Aaron Latham
• Oh how Shakespeare would have loved cinema! Derek Jarman
• I’d rather do theater and British films than move to LA in hopes of getting small roles in American films. Kate Winslet
• You should look straight at a film; that’s the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates. Werner Herzog
• It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkies instead of the other way around. Mary Pickford
• A star on a movie set is like a time bomb. That bomb has got to be defused so people can approach it without fear. Jack Nicholson
• In this industry, there are only two ways up the ladder. Rung by rung or claw your way to the top. It’s sure been tough on my nails. Jack Nicholson
• What I’ve learned is that life is too short and movies are too long. Denis Leary
• Virtue has its own reward, but has no sale at the box office. Mae West
• Usually when you see females in movies, they feel like they have these metallic structures around them, they are caged by male energy. Björk
• It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it. Roger Ebert
• People who LIKE movies have a favorite. People who LOVE movies couldn’t possibly choose. Nicole Yatsonsky
• The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death. Jim Morrison
• A film is a petrified fountain of thought. Jean Cocteau
• No good film is too long and no bad movie is short enough. Roger Ebert
• Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them. Pauline Kael

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• A celebrity is any well-known TV or movie star who looks like he spends more than two hours working on his hair. Steve Martin
• A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache, so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan. Mel Brooks
• A monopolist is someone who keeps an elbow on each arm of a cinema seat.
• A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it. Ben Hecht
• A movie so Freudian that you keep expecting it to grow a beard and move to Vienna. Mark Lawson
• Acting: An art which consists of keeping the audience from coughing.  Ralph Richardson
• Don’t wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects. Roger Zelazny
• Dragging your boyfriend/husband to this movie will give him the leverage to demand multiple screenings of Jerry Bruckheimer films as penance. Ladies you have been warned. Rob Vaux
• For me the cinema is not a slice of life but a piece of cake. Alfred Hitchcock
• Give me a couple of years, and I’ll make that actress an overnight success. Samuel Goldwyn
• Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. John le Carr
• He looks like the guy in a science fiction movie who is the first to see the “Creature.” David Frye
• I got a German porno movie which has subtitles which is great ’cause otherwise I would have had no idea what was going on. Jordan Rubin
• I like wearing a blindfold while watching movies, so that I can focus on the dialogue. My favorite flicks are the silent movies. Jarod Kintz
• I really detest movies like Indecent Proposal and Pretty Woman because they send a message to women that sleeping with a rich man is the ultimate goal; and really that’s such a small part of it. Laura Kightlinger
• I took all the money I’ve been saving for a car and blew it on a movie.
• I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged. Stephen King
• I went to a wonderful movie. So refreshing. I felt like a new man when I woke up.
• I went to the cinema and the prices were: Adults $5.00 children $2.50; so I said “Give me two boys and a girl. ” Steven Wright
• I’m afraid I missed large portions of this movie because my eyes spent so much time rolling. Mark Ramsey
• I’ve made so many movies playing a hooker that they don’t pay me in the regular way anymore, they leave it on the dresser.   Shirley MacLaine
• It’s a movie script about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it. Mae West
• It’s disposable fun. Check your brain at the door on the way in. Drop all memory of the movie on your way out. Rubin Safaya
• Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can using only their hands and feet make some of the worst movies in the history of the world. Dave Barry
• Monopolist: someone who keeps an elbow on each arm of a cinema seat. M.C. Bell
• More people are killed in this movie than will ever see it. Jim Mullen
• My grandfather used to make home movies and edit out the joy. Richard Lewis
• My movies were the kind they show in prisons and airplanes, because nobody can leave. Burt Reynolds
• One of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. An instant landmark of crap. Matt Pais
• Only thing worse than watching a bad movie is being in one. Elvis Presley 
• Our comedies are not to be laughed at. Samuel Goldwyn
• Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours Roger Ebert
• Popcorn is the last area of the movie business where good taste is still a concern. Mike Barfield
• Rated G is nobody gets the girl. PG is the good guy gets the girl.  R is the bad guy gets the girl.  XXX is everybody gets the girl.
• Remember the good old days when the only bomb you had to worry about on a plane was the Rob Schneider movie? Jay Leno
• Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award. Billy Wilder
• Some movie stars wear their sunglasses even in church. They’re afraid God might recognize them and ask for autographs. Fred A. Allen
• Someday I would like to make a movie that makes people laugh and makes people cry and then makes them leave the theater in a quick and orderly manner so that others may come in. Jack Handey
• Television: A means of getting a babysitter so Mom and Dad can get out to the movies.
• The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. Alfred Hitchcock
• The movie is being revived around the country for midnight cult showings. Midnight is not late enough. Roger Ebert
• The movie people would have nothing to do with me until they heard me speak in a Broadway play; then they all wanted to sign me for the silent movies. C. Fields
• The trouble with censors is that they worry if a girl has cleavage. They ought to worry if she hasn’t any. Marilyn Monroe
• There are only three ages for women in Hollywood: Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy. Goldie Hawn
• There’s no thief like a bad movie. Sam Ewing
• This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness. Pauline Kael
• Those who cannot remember history are doomed to learn it from Oliver Stone movies. John Harkness
• Why did the Irish couple freeze at the drive in. They went to see the movie “Closed For The Winter.”
• Why should people go out and pay to see bad movies when they can stay home and see bad television for nothing. Samuel Goldwyn
• You can’t tell a book by its movie. Louis A. Safian
• You know that creepy-looking guy you stare at two seats behind you thinking who would come to a movie by himself? That’s me. Brendan Shanahan

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