"[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."

"You attract attention, you're going to get people killed who didn't need to be."

"Barry Shabaka Henley - Daniel"

"Irma P. Hall - Ida"

"Bruce McGill - Pedrosa"

"Javier Bardem - Felix"

"Peter Berg - Richard Weidner"

"Mark Ruffalo - Fanning"

"Jada Pinkett Smith - Annie"

"Jamie Foxx - Max"

"Tom Cruise - Vincent"

"Traffic Cop: Hey, man, what did you do, have a food fight in here?"

"Daniel: I mean, everybody and their momma knew you don't just come up and talk to Miles Davis. I mean, he may have looked like he was chilling, but he was absorbed. This one hip couple, one of them tried to shake his hand one day. And the guy says, "Hi, my name is..." Miles said, "Get the fuck outta my face, you jive motherfucker, and take your silly bitch with you.""

"Airport Man / Frank Martin: Enjoy L.A."

"If I'm wrong you get an apology, I already used up my free ride for tonight."

"I'm not Vincent, my name is Max! I'm a goddamn cab driver!"

"That's why I tossed the list -- the work ups, all of that shit. To protect, in part, your... Hermes, Facconable ass. What, do you think I like coming in here? But hey. Shit happens. Gotta roll with it. Adapt. Darwin, I Ching."

"[right before he crashes the cab, to Vincent] Go fuck yourself."

"[after seeing the guy fall on his cab's roof] My man, you all right?"

"[about Vincent] Definitely not from around here."

"There's no good reason, there's no bad reason to live or to die."

"Hey, Max, a guy gets on the MTA here in L.A. and dies. Think anybody will notice?"

"Six hours he's riding the subway before anybody notices his corpse doing laps around L.A., people on and off sitting next to him. Nobody notices."

"[Mockingly] "Someday, someday my dream will come?" One night you'll wake up and you'll discover it never happened. It's all turned around on you, and it never will. Suddenly you are old. It didn't happen, and it never will because you were never going to do it anyway. You'll push it into memory, then zone out in your barcalounger, being hypnotized by daytime TV for the rest of your life. Don't you talk to me about murder. All it ever took was a down payment on a Lincoln Town Car, and that girl... you can't even call that girl. What the fuck are you still doing driving a cab?"

"Get with it. Millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars, and a speck on one in a blink. That's us, lost in space. The cop, you, me... Who notices?"

"[aims a handgun at Max] Red light, Max."

"Most people, ten years from now, same job, same place, same routine. Everything the same. Just keeping it safe over and over and over. Ten years from now. Man, you don’t know where you’ll be ten minutes from now . . ."

"Max, I do this for a living!"

"[after Max destroys his briefcase] All my prep was in there! You are screwing with my work! Let's see what else you can do."

"[after Max crashes the cab] Well, that was brilliant..."

"Yo, homie. Is that my briefcase?"

"If you open that trunk, they go inside."

"Don't get me cornered. You don't have the trunk space."

"[after the nightclub shootout] Only thing that didn't show up is the Polish cavalry."

"I am a cool guy, with a job I contracted to do."

"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"

"Ted Levine – Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb"

"Kasi Lemmons – Ardelia Mapp"