John Cassavetes

“I have a one-track mind. That's all that I'm interested in - love. And the lack of it. When it stops.”

“As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail.”

“No matter how old you get, if you can keep the desire to be creative, you're keeping the man-child alive.”

“Commercial movies have no feeling, no sensitivity. Most people tell me people won't understand films with feeling. But everyone can feel.”

“I won't call my work entertainment. It's exploring. It's asking questions of people, constantly. 'How much do you feel? How much do you know? Are you aware of this? Can you cope with this?' A good movie will ask you questions you don't already know the answers to. Why would I want to make a film about something I already understand?”

“People have said that my films are very difficult to watch, that they're experiences you are put through rather than ones you enjoy, and it's true.”

“I don't care about being on top, about being No. 1. I just make movies for a few suckers in the audience, anyway.”

“We only have two hours to change people's lives.”

“By the age of 50, I would like to know that I'm not dead - that there's some continuity to my life.”

“The camera is the slave to the actor.”

“We have problems, terrible problems, but our problems are human problems.”

“I hate entertainment.”

“My parents allowed their two sons to be individuals. My family was a wild and wonderful place, with lots of friends and neighbors visiting and talking loud and eating loud and nobody telling the children to be quiet or putting them down.”

“Film is, to me, just unimportant. But people are very important.”

“You know as a director what you want, but the film is smarter than you, the film says no, the film says there's something more here.”

“I think I probably have the philosophy of a poor man. You know, like maybe I'd steal the pennies off a dead man's eyes.”

“You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all.”

“You can defeat fear through humor, through pain, through honesty, bravery, intuition, and through love in the truest sense.”

“The idea of love as a mysterious, undiscovered world has come to have no place in our innermost imagination.”

“I would put my pictures up against anybody's in this world. Certainly in my own day I bow to no one. I don't think there's another director in the world who works harder to make better films than I do.”