Mike Nichols

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

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

“The reason you do this stuff - comedy, plays, movies - is to be seized by something, to disappear in the service of an idea.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Everybody wants to be known. Everybody's a Kardashian.”

“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.”

“'Catch-22' was a nightmare to make, and everybody was unhappy except me.”

“I used to say that winning the Oscar means being back at the Beverly Hills Hotel at 1 A.M. feeling empty. It's the industry voting. It doesn't come from God. It doesn't change your life, really.”

“Being with an insanely jealous person is like being in the room with a dead mammoth.”

“I don't know that a political climate - as long as it's still a free country - makes much difference in the film world.”

“It's very, very corrupting to the spirit, doing comedy. And you have to be almost a saint, like Jack Benny was, like Steve Martin is, to avoid the corrupting of it, because there's very little work where the actual work and the reward are simultaneous, and comedy is that.”

“There are absolutely almost perfect people who experience no guilt; they don't know what it is. They simply do what they need to do - or want to do - next. They see nothing wrong with it. They feel no guilt. They express no guilt. And it's not even certain what harm they do.”

“I never understand when people say, 'Do you do comedy or tragedy?' I don't think they're very much different. They both have to be true, and there isn't a great play in the world that doesn't have funny parts to it - as 'Salesman' does, as 'King Lear' does. The whole idea is to reflect life in some way, which means surely you have to have both.”

“The producers want us to sell, sell, sell. That's my little joke. That's what we do by day; by night, we're artists.”

“A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.”

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

“Improvisation has to do with exploring something like two brothers in a room together. You find out things about situations by discovering the things that they aren't saying. It's a way to explore scenes. Sometimes it's more useful than others, but it's always there to see if there's anything that you might improve.”

“If you want to be a legend, God help you, it's so easy. You just do one thing. You can be the master of suspense, say. But if you want to be as invisible as is practical, then it's fun to do a lot of different things.”