Quotes from Warren Beatty

I think I've been lucky enough not to have to do movie after movie after movie for financial reasons, so I've been able to live life and also make movies. I didn't have to grind them out. I could go long periods where I was living life rather than tripping over cables.

I think I've had 16 books that purport to be a biography of me. I've never cooperated with someone.

How can anybody hate nurses? Nobody hates nurses. The only time you hate a nurse is when they're giving you an enema.

For me, the highest level of sexual excitement is in a monogamous relationship.

My notion of a wife at 40 is that a man should be able to change her, like a bank note, for two 20s.

Lenin said that people vote with their feet. Well, that's what's happening. They either go, or they don't go. It's all politics. It's all demographics.

Marriage requires a special talent, like acting. Monogamy requires genius.

Organized labor, if they're doing a responsible job, is going to organize the pooling of small amounts of money to protect the interests of the people who are not rich.

You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.

For years, Warner Bros. was trying to get me to make a movie about Howard Hughes.

Being here allows me to make the case that not all aging, narcissistic movie actors whose children could be mistaken for their grandchildren necessarily act with the same motivation.

Lenin said that people vote with their feet. Well, that's what's happening. They either go, or they don't go. It's all politics. It's all demographics.

It makes you feel good when a movie works. Usually when I see an old movie I've made, I say to myself, 'Oh God, why did I do this?' and 'Why didn't I change that?' and things like that.

Government is not show business.

Character is plot, and casting is character.

Movies are fun, but they're not a cure for cancer.

I've never talked to anyone writing a book on me. I've had so much written about me that is made up, usually something that seems silly enough or weird enough to get remarked upon, and it's pretty much all fiction.

Building a house is a lot like moviemaking. The attention to detail, the sense that you're doing something that has longevity.

My mother and my father were teachers. My grandmother and my grandfather were teachers. This is something I really know about. Even when I was a kid, it was a profession my father couldn't stay in, because he couldn't make enough money.

And then the conditions of safety - or lack of safety - for teachers in public schools, and the disparity between public schools and private schools is shameful.

There's almost nothing that hasn't been said about me. But there's an awful lot that I haven't said. I don't talk about private things.

If I had done some of the movies that I was offered as an actor - and very good movies, by the way, and some of them big moneymakers - I don't know that I ever would have taken what was the concentration or the time to do the movies that I produced. 'Reds' is a good example, but 'Shampoo' is also an example, and so was 'Heaven Can Wait.'

There are some people whom you have in life who have the capacity for real, passionate commitment to something, and sometimes you may be passionately committed to the same thing.

I don't want to be mushy about it, but having four kids is definitely the best thing that has ever happened to me, and each kid is, to me, more fascinating than any five movies.