Warren Beatty

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

“I have been famous for a long time.”

“It's hard to misquote someone who doesn't say anything.”

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

“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.”

“By attracting attention to yourself, you distract people from the movie. Ideally, you like a movie to speak for itself. You don't describe a song before you sing it or tell about a painting before you show it. You don't reveal the recipe before you serve the dish. You taste it.”

“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.”

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

“You know you're old when you're asked, 'Do you have hobbies?'”

“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.”

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

“Invented memory is a subject that fascinates me.”

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

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

“I'm slow at everything I do.”

“I would say that I wasn't so much afraid of marriage as afraid of divorce.”

“There's no point in making a movie just to be making a movie.”

“Government is not show business.”

“I left Northwestern University after a year and was in New York playing piano in a little bar on 58th Street, and I didn't know whether to go back.”

“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.'”