Cinema Quotes

Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.  ~Roman Polanski


Acting:  An art which consists of keeping the audience from coughing.  ~Ralph Richardson


Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.  ~Alfred Hitchcock


Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.  ~John LeCarre


The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.  ~Alfred Hitchcock


A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.  ~Alfred Hitchcock


A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself.  ~Don Marquis


Never judge a book by its movie.  ~J.W. Eagan


I've spent several years in Hollywood, and I still think the movie heroes are in the audience.  ~Wilson Mizner


Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.  ~Jessamyn West


Most horror movies are certainly that.  ~Brendan Francis


You know, when I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather.  Later he played my father and finally he played my husband.  If he had lived I'm sure I would have played his mother.  That's the way it is in Hollywood.  The men get younger and the women get older.  ~Lillian Gish


What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out.  ~Agnes Repplier


What I've learned is that life is too short and movies are too long.  ~Denis Leary


There are only three ages for women in Hollywood - Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.  ~Goldie Hawn


Acting is like a Halloween mask that you put on.  ~River Phoenix


Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when they can stay home and see bad television for nothing?  ~Samuel Goldwyn


Compared to a novel, a film is like an economy pizza where there are no olives, no ham, no anchovies, no mushrooms, and all you've got is the dough.  ~Louis de Bernières


The chief difference between horror fans and science fiction fans lies in why they won't walk backwards.  A horror fan won't walk backwards because he knows he'll be knifed by a madman.  A science fiction fan won't walk backwards because he knows he'll step on the cat.  ~Aaron Allston


It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkies instead of the other way around.  ~Mary Pickford


A play should give you something to think about.  When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.  ~T.S. Eliot, New York Post, 22 September 1963


Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one?  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Rated G is nobody gets the girl.  PG is the good guy gets the girl.  R is the bad guy gets the girl.  XXX is everybody gets the girl.  ~Author Unknown


Movie-making is the process of turning money into light.  All they have at the end of the day is images flickering on a wall.  ~John Boorman, Money into Light, 1985


There's no thief like a bad movie.  ~Sam Ewing


If I find a film dull, I find it infinitely more entertaining to watch the scratches.  ~Norman McLaren