"There was no doubt about Sandra's experience and lack of inhibition. She spread herself and I entered her. She wasn't unresponsive. Yet, when I asked her softly if she was liking it, she resorted to her favorite expression: ‘It’s all right.’"

"We dried ourselves and each other. She said she was feeling better. Then, very gently, I began to kiss and caress her. After this had gone on for some time, I led her over to the couch."

"‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. She said her asthma was playing her up.… She was wheezing quite audibly by now. She picked up my towel and said, ‘I’d better rest awhile; otherwise I might pass out.’"

"I can only say that whatever my life and work have been, I'm not envious of anyone — and this is my biggest satisfaction."

"In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner. If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it's on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent."

"People like Truffaut, Lelouch and Godard are like little kids playing at being revolutionaries. I've passed through this stage. I lived in a country where these things happened seriously."

"I want people to go to the movies. I am the man of the spectacle. I'm playing."

"I never made a film which fully satisfied me."

"You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity."

"If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck young girls!"

"It's easy to direct while acting — there’s one less person to argue with."

"I see Macbeth as a young, open-faced warrior, who is gradually sucked into a whirpool of events because of his ambition. When he meets the weird sisters and hears their prophecy, he's like the man who hopes to win a million — a gamble for high stakes."

"I don't know that you can speak of shock … Nothing is too shocking for me. I don't really know what is shocking. When you tell the story of a man who is beheaded, you have to show how they cut off his head. If you don't, it's like telling a dirty joke and leaving out the punch line."

"Without her I feel lost, I can't explain this in words. However there are things that I just can't stand thinking of; the way she and our son died."

"I'm forced to mix with people of this industry and I can swear that is really difficult to meet people with her nature and her spirit. Generally, everybody is opportunistic here. Sharon had grace and charm; she knew how to make anybody's life easier. When somebody was busy, she was there in a discreet manner to serve you a drink or a coffee."

"She was the least hypocritical woman you could ever meet: once, when an executive told her that we should ask for single cabins in the transatlantic that brought us to the United States, she simply said, "Why? Everybody knows that we live together.""

"Michael, I know she’s a nice girl. She’s too bloody nice. She's supposed to be playing a bitch. Every day I have to make her into a bitch."

"It's weird. I always had the premonition that Sharon belonged to me just for a little while."

"He sees things from every point of view. He's an extraordinarily hard worker. I think he's worked for a long time, in every field. He's talented, passionate and has had an incredibly hard and full life that I'm sure you know about. I can not imagine myself having some of his experiences. You either swim or drown, but some like him go on and make every moment important. I think that's what he does."

"I would rather live in a country where children are protected and their predators prosecuted, and even (which in Hollywood is evidently not always the same thing) disapproved of."

"The probation officers quoted a pair of psychiatrists as saying that Mr. Polanski was not “a pedophile” or a “sexual deviate.”"

"When a man marries his mistress, he creates a job vacancy."

"When a man steals your wife there is no better revenge than to let him keep her."

"The little I know, I owe to my ignorance."

"You can pretend to be serious but you can't pretend to be witty."

"Honest women are inconsolable for the mistakes they haven't made."

"To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance."

"Fierce and pure, I was the theater of a fairyland restored to life."

"By remaining inaccessible, he became the epitome of those whom I have named and who stagger me. I was therefore chaste."

"I suffered at the time from an ugliness I no longer find on my childhood face."

"If the hero join combat with night and conquer it, may shreds of it remain upon him!"

"But I would adore that thief who is my mother."

"This violence is a calm that disturbs you."

"There has been talk about (The Blacks) revival. Angelou comments: "It was a very important play. It still is an important play. It implies that, come the revolution, Blacks will be as bad and as greedy as Whites have been. What goes around comes around, which is a very Black statement, an African statement, too. "Working for me as a young woman, with the cast of The Blacks, was an incredible experience. The original cast included Cecily (sic) Tyson, James Earl Jones, Raymond St. Jacques, Roscoe Lee Browne, Lou Gossett, Charles Gordone, Helen Martin, Cynthia Belgrave, Jay Flash Riley, Lex Monson, Godfrey Cambridge, Ethel Ayler, and me. It was the thing to go into; if you were out of a job, go try out for The Blacks. It was wonderful to break down the play together. Obviously it fed all our artistic growth. "It would be interesting to see it today with some new people. All the [original] actors have done so many things since [that they] would bring so much other equipment to it now. Just like the time-instead of 1960-61, 1977 has its own rhythm and its own impetus."

"The Day the Palestinians become institutionalized, I will no longer be on their side."

"So long as we were in a room in a brothel, we belonged to our fantasies, but once having exposed them, we're now tied up with human beings, tied to you and forced to go on with this adventure according to the laws of visibility."

"Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. I wondered at its perfect coherence, which rejected me."

"With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassimilable."

"But--criminals are remote from you--as in love, they turn away and turn me away from the world and its laws. Thiers smells of sweat, sperm, and blood. In short, to my body and my thristy soul it offers devotion. It was because their world contains these erotic conditions that I was bent on evil."

"Yet, what is their violence compared to mine, which was to accept theirs, to make it mine, to wish it for myself, to intercept it, to utilize it, to force it upon myself, to know it, to premeditate it, to discern and assume its perils? But what was mine, willed and necessary for my defense, my toughness, my rigor, compared to the violence they underwent like a malediction, risen from an inner fire simultaneously with an outer light which sets them ablaze and illuminates us?"

"I would never see a good movie for the first time on television."

"Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second."

"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."

"To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body—both go together, they can’t be separated."

"All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl."

"Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self."

"Fifty years after the October Revolution, the American industry rules cinema the world over. There is nothing much to add to this statement of fact. Except that on our own modest level we too should provoke two or three Vietnams in the bosom of the vast Hollywood-Cinecittá-Mosfilm-Pinewood-etc. empire, and, both economically and aesthetically, struggling on two fronts as it were, create cinemas which are national, free, brotherly, comradely and bonded in friendship."

"The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea."

"Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion."

"Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung-fu film."