"Judge Miriam Shoat: You are making a mockery of my courtroom, and I'm not going to allow it. I suggest you start representing your client and stop representing yourself."

"Janet Venable: Do you know what I would do if someone did that to me? I would kill him—I wouldn't hesitate. I would stab him 78 times. I would chop off his fingers, slash his throat open, carve numbers in his chest, gouge out his eyes, I swear to God! But that's me."

"He come crying to me like always, stuttering and whining. "I ca-can't take it no more, Roy. You g-got to help me". I said, "Shut your mouth, you little girl! Grow up. Be a man. Take care of yourself"."

"I got you now. You're the lawyer. You're his lawyer, ain't you? With your fancy suit. I heard about you. Well, my, my, you sure fucked this one up, counselor. Sounds to me like they're gonna shoot old Aaron so full of poison it'll come out his eyes!"

"Why gamble with money when you can gamble with people's lives? That was a joke. All right, I'll tell you. I believe in the notion that people are innocent until proven guilty. I believe in that notion because I choose to believe in the basic goodness of people. I choose to believe that not all crimes are committed by bad people. And I try to understand that some very, very good people do some very bad things."

"First thing I ask a new client is, "Have you been saving for a rainy day? Well, guess what? It's raining!""

"One Rocco more or less isn't worth dying for!"

"Claire Trevor — Gaye Dawn"

"William Haade — Ralph Feeney"

"Lionel Barrymore — James Temple"

"Thomas Gomez — Richard "Curly" Hoff"

"Harry Lewis — Edward "Toots" Bass"

"Lauren Bacall — Nora Temple"

"Edward G. Robinson — Johnny Rocco"

"Humphrey Bogart — Frank McCloud"

"Key Largo, a lonely island off the coast of Florida, sultry, heat-ridden, cloaked in the strange menace of the sea. But stranger still is the destiny that brings these people to this remote outpost, to be held at bay with a price on their lives, by a man with a price on his head."

"When your head says one thing and your whole life says another, your head always loses."

"Hold your course, you're headed straight for Key Largo, Kay Largo..."

"Richard "Curly" Hoff: She is a lush, the lady...after she bends the elbow a few times, she begins to see things—rats, roaches, bats, you know...a sock in the kisser is the only thing that will bring her out of it."

"Edward "Toots" Bass: I say smack her and let it go at that."

"You don't like it, do you Rocco, the storm? Show it your gun, why don't you? If it doesn't stop, shoot it."

"Charlie! Charlie Winook and his family, Crawfish Island. Charlie's a prince of the Seminole Nation. His ancestors go back to the gods. He sells sea shells by the sea shore."

"[praying] Make a big wave. Send it down on us. Destroy us all if need be, but punish HIM."

"[to Johnny Rocco] You’re right, you shouldn’t have been deported, you should have been exterminated."

"[to Frank] If you want to find out how good you are at taking it, we'll accommodate you. But let me warn you. Toots is a little rusty. Might slip. And that'd be tooo baaad."

"Nothing to stop me from wiping you all out!"

"You'd give your left arm to nail me wouldn't you? I could see the headlines now, 'Local Deputy Captures Johnny Rocco'. Your picture'd be in all the papers. You might even get to tell on the newsreels how you pulled if off, yeah. Listen hick, I was too much for any big city police force to handle. It took the United States Government to pin a rap on me. And they won't make it stick. You hick! I'll be back pulling strings to get guys elected mayor and governor before you ever get a 10-buck raise. Yeah, how many of those guys in office owe everything to me. I made them. Yeah, I made 'em, just like a-like a tailor makes a suit of clothes. I take a nobody, see? Teach him what to say. Get his name in the papers and pay for his campaign expenses. Dish out a lotta groceries and coal. Get my boys to bring the voters out. And then count the votes over and over again till they added up right and he was elected. Yeah- then what happens? Did he remember when the going got tough, when the heat was on? No, he didn't wanna. All he wanted was to save his own dirty neck. . . . Yeah, `Public Enemy,' he calls me. Me, who gave him his `Public' all wrapped up with a fancy bow on it."

"After living in the USA for more than thirty-five years they called me an undesirable alien. Me. Johnny Rocco. Like I was a dirty Red or something!"

"Would you fuck me? I'd fuck me. I'd fuck me hard. I'd fuck me so hard..."

"It’s about one young woman trying desperately to save the life of another young woman. And in order to do that, she’s faced with the overwhelming obstacle of all these men"

"I thought that in that movie The Elephant Man, that he was the ultimate good doctor, just the greatest doctor of all. So my thinking was, what happens if the greatest doctor of all goes wrong?"

"I thought The Silence of the Lambs was an absolutely brilliant book. The easiest way for me to understand the huge success of the movie starts with what a great book Thomas Harris wrote to begin with. He created those characters for Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins and Ted Levine to bring to life. As a filmmaker, I had the delicious job of being the moviegoing audience's representative at the place where the film version was now going to happen. Of course, I had my own ideas about the strengths of the book and how best to visualize them for the screen. Same thing with Beloved. In Beloved, there was zero invention: We didn't have to fix anything in the book, no gaping holes, no problems that had to be solved. The film is very faithful to the book, because we were all so inspired by the book that we simply transferred that inspiration to the screen. Silence Of The Lambs was essentially the same situation, except for the ending. Thomas Harris ended the book in a very meditative, poetic sort of way. This being a movie, we needed something a little bit more galvanizing as a sign-off, so we came up with the phone call and a glimpse of Dr. Lecter following Dr. Chilton off into the Caribbean sunset."

"The lesbian community is under siege, we always try to present to the heterosexual community the idealized version, but I do not think that's a good way to do it, even though I can understand where it's coming from. ("Valerie Miner talked about the kinds of self-censorship she finds in her work when she starts thinking she should present only positive images of lesbians or working-class people.") Yes. In that poem and also in the poem "Night Voice" I do that. There's this whole controversy now over media images of lesbians and gays and bisexuals. It's brought out in movies like Basic Instinct and Silence of the Lambs where they are presented as killers. It comes up in the novels of P. D. James, where she has these criminals who are lesbians or gay men. And I hate that. But, at the same time, I want the dirty laundry to be out there, whether it's on the Mexican culture or the lesbian culture or the bisexual. And I'm not sure how you do that."

"Stuart Rudin – "Multiple" Miggs"

"Danny Darst – Sergeant Tate"

"Brooke Smith – Catherine Martin"

"Diane Baker – Senator Ruth Martin"

"Scott Glenn – Jack Crawford"