Film-making asks us to feel time — what to hold, what to cut, what to trust. As Roger Ebert reminds us: “No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.”

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet. ~ Orson Welles

Cinema has no boundaries… we all belong to the same artistic community. ~ Bruce Willis

For me, movies should be visual. If you want dialogue, you should read a book. ~ Vilmos Zsigmond

Anybody can direct, but there are only eleven good writers. ~ Mel Brooks

A movie doesn’t have to do everything. A movie just has to do a couple of things. If it does those things well and gives you a cool night at the movies, an emotion, that’s good enough. ~ Quentin Tarantino

Once you have found the right shot to introduce the scene — your first declarative sentence — then the rest flows. You’ve found the key to the whole scene. ~ John Huston

I’m a filmmaker. I’m an artist. I’ve chosen to work in history the way someone might choose to work in still lifes or landscapes. ~ Ken Burns

Once you finish a film, it doesn’t belong to you anymore — it belongs to the audience to interpret it the way they feel like interpreting. ~ Clint Eastwood

Every time I get a script it’s a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It’s like falling in love — you can’t give a reason why. ~ Paul Newman

Never treat your audience as customers, always as partners. ~ Jimmy Stewart

I throw a spear into darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find it. That is intellect. ~ Ingmar Bergman

Of course, at their best, movies are anti-literature and, as a medium, belong not to writers, not to actors, but to directors. ~ Truman Capote, Portraits & Observations