Quotes from Nicholas Meyer

As a writer, you have control of the words you put on the page. But once that manuscript leaves your hand, you give control to the reader. As a director, you are limited by everything: weather, budget, and egos.

An actor is someone who pretends to be somebody else. A movie star is somebody who pretends that somebody else is them.

A screenplay is not a finished product; a novel is. A screenplay is a blueprint for something - for a building that will most likely never be built.

Schools and libraries are the twin cornerstones of a civilized society. Libraries are only good if people use them, like books only exist when someone reads them.

The first thing that put me on the map was my Sherlock Holmes novel.

There are moments in one's life where you look back and you say, 'Well, I wish I had done this differently.

The director is a bit analogous to the conductor of a symphony orchestra. It's a collaborative adventure.

Leo Tolstoy said the purpose of art is to teach you to love life. And that's what I want.

Actors will change their face, will change their hair, will change their voice, will disappear into the role. A movie star doesn't disappear.

I was always a filmmaker before I was anything else. If I was always anything, I was a storyteller, and it never really made much of a difference to me what medium I worked in.

Art doesn't just happen by accident. It is about pulling out new tricks and trying new things.

Art and commerce are not irreconciliable, they are inextricably intertwined.

What I want any genre to do, what I want any work of art to do, is to illuminate the human condition.

If canines can be conditioned to salivate over nonexistent food, may not men one day be likewise taught to salivate at the prospect of nonexistent facts?

I was responsible for a clause that is now standard in all studio DVDs, the disclaimer that states that the studio is in no way responsible for any of the content or comments made by people appearing in the interviews on the disc. It is hard to overstate the importance of this clause: It enables those supplementary DVD segments to be more than mere puff pieces but a valuable form of oral history. People can tell their differing, multiple versions and perceptions of the truth

The French director Robert Bresson made the observation: "My job is not to find out what the public want and give it to them; my job is to make the public want what I want.

A European war! Millions of lives! Often I had been astonished by my friend's amazing powers, but never had I seen him infer so much on the basis of so little. And, great heavens, what if it should prove true? I do not know how Freud passed that night, but my dreams surpassed my waking fears. The gay and colourful city of Johann Strauss was no longer revolving to the stately strains of his waltzes, but swirling to the shriek of a terrible nightmare.

How can you even think of food after what you have just witnessed?' 'It is because of what I have witnessed that I find it crossing my mind. Food is one of the principal means by which death is avoided.' - from Nicholas Meyer's "West End Horror" (dialogue tags removed for ease of reading)

Translation is a tricky business," Holmes observed, placing the tips of his fingers together in his accustomed fashion. "Cervantes once said that reading something in translation is like looking at a Flemish tapestry wrong side out. The image may be there, but is obscured by a great many dangling threads.

In addition to Bronson Canyon and Alaska, the company went into deepest Simi Valley, where we filmed the climatic peace conference at a Jewish community center with what we hoped would register as futuristic architecture.

That night Holmes awoke in a high fever and was delirious. As Freud and I sat by his bedside, each restraining the movement of his hands, he babbled of oysters overrunning the world and similar nonsense.* Freud listened with the greatest attention. "Is he fond of oysters?" he demanded of me during a quiet interval. I shrugged, too confused to answer accurately.

There will always be a war between light and darkness, between science and superstition, between education and ignorance. Ignorance is easier. It requires no study. Faith is the enemy of thought.