[on Jack Nicholson] Jack is the sort of guy who takes parts others have turned down, might turn down, and explodes them into something nobody could have conceived of. All his brilliance of character and gesture is consumed and made invisible by the expanse of his nature.

[on working with Orson Welles on "Catch-22"] We were talking about Jean Renoir one day on the set and Orson said, very touchingly, that Renoir was a great man but that unfortunately Renoir didn`t like his pictures. And then he said, "Of course, if I were Renoir I wouldn`t like my pictures either."

A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don`t.

When I was 17, for my first job, I worked at the midtown Howard Johnson`s. A customer asked me what our ice-cream flavor of the week was, which was a dumb question, because there was a huge banner showing that it was maple. So I told him that it was chicken. The customer laughed, but the manager fired me immediately. They were bastards there.

[on Elizabeth Taylor] There are three things I never saw Elizabeth Taylor do: Tell a lie; be unkind to anyone; and be on time.

I`ve never understood that aspect of DVDs, where you suddenly put back the things you took out that could go. Why ruin your movie? With material that you`ve taken out? I never get that. I don`t have that impulse... To put them back seems very unpleasant to me. And pointless. It`s like when you`ve written something, when you cut a paragraph, doesn`t it seem dead to you? Doesn`t it look like something you`d never want to include, because the point is, it could go? You`ll never see anything in my pictures, the stuff that came out, stays out.

It`s not a film-maker`s job to explain his technique, but to tell his story the best way he can.

If everybody`s adorable, you can`t go anywhere, you can`t have any events.

[Part of 2005 Tony Award acceptance speech] "God, my head is totally empty. I had a thing I was going to say, and I have forgot it, because I had given up so long ago. But the first thing to say is thank you. To the other members of my category, my friends Jack and James and Bartlett, I guess you are thinking age before beauty, me too! My congratulations to the winners. My love to those who have not won tonight. I just want to remind you of my motto: Cheer up, life isn`t everything. It always stands me in good stead."

I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That`s the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.