Quotes from Francis Ford Coppola

I just admire people like Woody Allen, who every year writes an original screenplay. It's astonishing. I always wished that I could do that.

The internet in hotels should be free - and I really resent it when they charge you five dollars for a bottle of water beside your bed.

Sound is your friend because sound is much cheaper than picture, but it has equal effect on the audience - in some ways, perhaps more effect because it does it in a very indirect way.

I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten.

Listen, if there's one sure-fire rule that I have learned in this business, it's that I don't know anything about human nature.

It takes no imagination to live within your means.

We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.

I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing.

When I was going for my graduate degree, I decided I was going to make a feature film as my thesis. That's what I was famous for-that I had my thesis film be a feature film, which was 'You're a Big Boy Now.'

People feel the worst film I made was 'Jack.' But to this day, when I get checks from old movies I've made, 'Jack' is one of the biggest ones. No one knows that. If people hate the movie, they hate the movie. I just wanted to work with Robin Williams.

Steven Spielberg is unique. I feel that the kinds of movies he loves are the same kinds of movies that the big mass audience loves. He's very fortunate because he can do the things he naturally likes the best, and he's been very successful.

We were raised in an Italian-American household, although we didn't speak Italian in the house. We were very proud of being Italian, and had Italian music, ate Italian food.

I had a heartbreaking experience when I was 9. I always wanted to be a guard. The most wonderful girl in the world was a guard. When I got polio and then went back to school, they made me a guard. A teacher took away my guard button.

They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family.

I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist, the solo flute for Toscanini.

I'm no longer dependent on the movie business to make a living. So if I want to make movies as other old guys would play golf, I can.

I was never sloppy with other people's money. Only my own. Because I figure, well, you can be.

When newspapers started to publish the box office scores of movies, I was horrified. Those results are totally fake because they never include the promotion budget.

I wanted to write and direct movies and not be forced to adapt them from a bestselling book.

Most Italians who came to this country are very patriotic. There was this exciting possibility that if you worked real hard, and you loved something, you could become successful.

I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying he wanted me to make up dialogue.

It's ironic that at age 32, at probably the greatest moment of my career, with The Godfather having such an enormous success, I wasn't even aware of it, because I was somewhere else under the deadline again.

I've been offered lots of movies. There's always some actor who's doing a project and would like to have me do it. But you look at the project and think, 'Gee, there are a lot of good directors who could do that.' I'd like to do something only I can do.

We teach our boys to firebomb villages, but we won't let them write fuck on the side of their planes because it's obscene.