Quotes from Mike Nichols

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

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.

Very often when a story really holds us, it gets pushed away because it's too close for comfort.

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.

There's nothing in the American dream about character. It's a serious flaw.

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.

Things come in waves, and I'm always more interested in places like, for instance, Chicago, where people don't follow fashion. They're not galloping past your window on the way to the latest anything. They're living their lives. You do a play, they come and see it and say, 'That's nice', and then they go home.

I'm an enormous fan of 'The West Wing.' It was one of the very few shows I would watch every week.

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 still think that luck is what a lot of the good things come from. It's simply the luck of where you are, when.

My father wasn't too crazy about me. I loved him anyway. One of the things I regretted for a long time was that he died before he could see that he would be proud of me. I was actually more what he wished for than he thought.

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.

As a director, my job is, and always has been, divided into a number of things: dealing with the crew, the money and the studio, and the marketing and publicity. These are all different jobs that have to be learned and done as well as possible. The celebrity part rarely touches a director.

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.

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.

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.

American society to me and my brother was thrilling because, first of all, the food made noise. We were so excited about Rice Krispies and Coca-Cola. We had only silent food in our country, and we loved listening to our lunch and breakfast.

I had a high school girlfriend whose mother gave us theater tickets, so I saw the second night performance of 'A Streetcar Named Desire.' My girl and I could not get up during intermission, we were so stunned. To this day it's the only thing I've seen on stage that's 100 percent real and 100 percent poetic simultaneously.

For a director, a musical is a special kind of hell.

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.

I think the main thing about comedy and humor is that it's impossible and always was impossible to define.

Nerves provide me with energy... It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that's when I get worried.

I love the editing process of making movies. I just wish that life had one.

I came to love silence, because it's so rare, and it's now my favorite aural condition.