Mike Nichols

“Here's the most mysterious thing to me. I look back at those first plays I did and the first movies I did, and I only have one question, which is, 'What was I so confident about? Where did I get that?”

“Stand-up comedy is a very hard thing on the spirit. There are people who transcend it, like Jack Benny and Steve Martin, but in its essence, it's soul-destroying. It tends to turn people into control freaks.”

“In a weird way, when I was looking back, I didn't know I was going to be a director until I was.”

“Fear of comedy is all so much about who you do it with.”

“Most great plays of the past lose their grip on immediacy; on application to our lives right now.”

“Any good movie is filled with secrets.”

“I am drawn to the mystery of marriage. You can never know what the contract is between two people, and that is a very strong subject. I think it may be my subject.”

“If you're fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 and you're a Jew, you don't think so much about relationships. People didn't have a lot of divorces during the Holocaust, for instance.”

“The degree to which you're peculiar and different is the degree to which you must learn to hear people thinking. Just in self-defense you have to learn, where is their kindness? Where is their danger? Where is their generosity?”

“Comedy is brutal. It's powerful, though.”

“If you lose a parent, it never goes away. As a kid, I dreamed about my father coming back for 15 or 20 years. I still do sometimes.”

“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.”

“The whole point about laughter is it's like mercury: you can't catch it, you can't catch what motivates it - that's why it's funny.”

“People, by and large, would rather be talking than listening.”

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

“'Streetcar' is no longer about the moment at all. There is no Blanche DuBois anywhere; south, north, east or west. We don't have Blanche DuBois at the moment. But we have Willy Loman; everywhere we look we see Willy Loman. We are Willy Loman. We're on Facebook; we need to be known; we're selling all the time.”

“The things that you saw earlier in your life generally have more power than the things you saw last week.”

“I asked a shrink: 'Everything is so great. Why am I still so angry?' He said, 'Anger doesn't go away.' I always thought it was kind of a good engine.”

“I'm anything but confident.”

“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.”