Mike Nichols
There are absolutely almost perfect people who experience no guilt; they don't know what it is. They simply do what they need to do - or want to do - next. They see nothing wrong with it. They feel no guilt. They express no guilt. And it's not even certain what harm they do.Collection: Experience
My first memory in the world is my gym teacher ripping my mother's necklace off her neck and throwing it out the window and her running downstairs to go after it. I have no memory before that. I was 4. My father had a lot of girlfriends and my mother had a lot of boyfriends.Collection: Teacher
I think the main thing about comedy and humor is that it's impossible and always was impossible to define.Collection: Humor
The whole point about laughter is it's like mercury: you can't catch it, you can't catch what motivates it - that's why it's funny.Collection: Funny
I asked a shrink: 'Everything is so great. Why am I still so angry?' He said, 'Anger doesn't go away.' I always thought it was kind of a good engine.Collection: Anger
The only safe thing is to take a chance.Collection: Chance
I was standing right behind Marilyn, completely invisible, when she sang 'Happy birthday, Mr. President.' And indeed, the corny thing happened: Her dress split for my benefit, and there was Marilyn, and yes, indeed, she didn't wear any underwear.Collection: Birthday
You can always tell gifted and highly intelligent people as they always turn to the past. Any young person who knows anything that happened before 1980, or 1990, or 2000 for that matter, is immediately someone who is intelligent, probably creative, maybe a writer. Nobody who is drawn to the past and learning about the past is not gifted.Collection: Learning
'Catch-22' was a nightmare to make, and everybody was unhappy except me.
I'm in the theater because of two plays: 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and 'Death of a Salesman.'
Everybody wants to be known. Everybody's a Kardashian.
For a director, a musical is a special kind of hell.
Comedy is brutal. It's powerful, though.
Fear of comedy is all so much about who you do it with.
It's very, very corrupting to the spirit, doing comedy. And you have to be almost a saint, like Jack Benny was, like Steve Martin is, to avoid the corrupting of it, because there's very little work where the actual work and the reward are simultaneous, and comedy is that.
Chicago is not a very fashion-driven place. Nobody says, 'Oh, you've got to come see these fabulous people!' Nobody cares.
The reason you do this stuff - comedy, plays, movies - is to be seized by something, to disappear in the service of an idea.
If you want to be a legend, God help you, it's so easy. You just do one thing. You can be the master of suspense, say. But if you want to be as invisible as is practical, then it's fun to do a lot of different things.
I came to love silence, because it's so rare, and it's now my favorite aural condition.
You could say that it's in talking movies that inner life begins to appear. You can see things happen to the faces of people that were neither planned nor rehearsed.
The greatest thrill is that moment when a thousand people are sitting in the dark, looking at the same scene, and they are all apprehending something that has not been spoken. That's the thrill of it, the miracle - that's what holds us to movies forever. It's what we wish we could do in real life.
As a little kid in a sometimes hard place, I went to the movies as often as I could. Movies - making them, seeing them - is not something that could ever lose its pleasure for me. That puts them on a short list of things that eternally give me joy - love, family, food, movies.
Clay Aiken is amazing beyond that glorious voice. Turns out he is an excellent comic actor and a master of character.
I keep coming back to it, over and over - adultery and cheating. It's the most interesting problem in the theater. How else do you get Oedipus? That's the first cheating in the theater.
I think a director can make a play happen before your eyes so that you are part of it and it is part of you. If you can get it right, there's no mystery. It's not about mystery. It's not even mysterious. It's about our lives.
All movies are pure process. A commercial movie isn't less process than an art movie. You can't make your decisions about a film on the basis of, 'Is it important enough? Is it serious enough?' It's either alive or it's not for me. If it's alive, I want to do it.
The things that you saw earlier in your life generally have more power than the things you saw last week.
I don't expect anything from reviews. Sometimes I am bemused by them.
When we talk about reviews, what we are really talking about is just a market report - it's like reading about the new Lexus. You have to know what the guy writing the review cares about to understand his take. Does he like sports cars, or does he like Bentleys?
We are being entertained all the time - in the bathroom, on the train, in our beds. Sure, there is a smaller audience for theater. But we know from radio that entertainment never goes away, it just changes. And more power to it.
I think that to make something alive, instead of on a page, is an honorable task. And it turns me on.
Never let people see what you want, because they will not let you have it. Never let anybody see what you feel, because it gives them too much power. You're probably better off not showing weakness whenever you can avoid it, because they'll go for you.
It's the hardest thing on earth to like yourself, and then when you do, it's a catastrophe. I mean, the people I know who like themselves - I don't want to see them!
That seems to me the great American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.
There's nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you're meant to do. It's like falling in love.
I've learned that many of the worst things lead to the best things, that no great thing is achieved without a couple of bad, bad things on the way to them, and that the bad things that happen to you bring, in some cases, the good things.
I used to say that winning the Oscar means being back at the Beverly Hills Hotel at 1 A.M. feeling empty. It's the industry voting. It doesn't come from God. It doesn't change your life, really.
A great thing is happening on cable TV. You see characters change in stories over years, like in Tolstoy. That's a whole, thrilling new form that I really enjoy. They are Tolstoy-an in their endless character development and narrative changes... a show like 'Breaking Bad' is astonishing.
Directing is mystifying. It's a long, long, skid on an icy road, and you do the best you can trying to stay on the road... If you're still here when you come out of the spin, it's a relief. But you've got to have the terror if you're going to do anything worthwhile.
Nerves provide me with energy... It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that's when I get worried.
Being with an insanely jealous person is like being in the room with a dead mammoth.
The thing about being an outsider... is that it teaches you to hear what people are thinking because you're constantly looking for the people who just don't give a damn.
If you're fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 and you're a Jew, you don't think so much about relationships. People didn't have a lot of divorces during the Holocaust, for instance.
Plays, especially great plays, yield their secrets over a long period of time. You can't read it three times and say, 'OK, I got it. I know what's happening.'
The producers want us to sell, sell, sell. That's my little joke. That's what we do by day; by night, we're artists.
It took me forever, learning improvisation, because I had studied with Lee Strasberg - I dropped out of Chicago and went to his classes in New York for a couple of years, once or twice a week. What I didn't realize was I was learning directing because he wasn't all that good about acting, not for me.
I believed early and still believe that everybody who can act can do it already, just they don't know how and don't want to talk about it.
I never understand when people say, 'Do you do comedy or tragedy?' I don't think they're very much different. They both have to be true, and there isn't a great play in the world that doesn't have funny parts to it - as 'Salesman' does, as 'King Lear' does. The whole idea is to reflect life in some way, which means surely you have to have both.
The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.
You want to make money, remake 'Cinderella.' You want to move people, remake the Hippolytus and Phaedra myth.