Motion Picture Quotes & Sayings

West Side Story was a highly popular and successful musical play and now is a similarly well-received motion picture. (I would think that it could also be used shrewdly as a document for discussion in Sunday Schools, in place of some of the ridiculous curriculum materials now in use). — William Stringfellow

This motion-picture muddle had distracted me from my writing. — Zane Grey

The motion picture is the people's Art. — Adela Rogers St. Johns

If life is envisioned as a continuously running motion picture, the keeping of a notebook stops the action and allows a meaningful scene to be explored frame by frame. — Jo Coudert

When 'Catch Me If You Can' was published back in 1980, I never dreamed that it would become a bestseller, much less a major motion picture and now a big Broadway musical. What's amazing about the book is that it has never gone out of print. — Frank Abagnale

A picture was a motionless record of motion. An arrested representation of life. A picture was the kiss of death pretending to possess immutability. — Ivan Klima

Looking back at Batman from a distance after all the hype has dried up and the franchise has at least temporarily been abandoned it's easy to see the movie for what it is: a moderately diverting motion picture that should have been shorter and better paced. There are a lot of things wrong with Batman , but it still makes for decent entertainment in the fine tradition of the typical low-intelligence summer movie. The best thing that can be said about Batman is that it led to Batman Returns , which was a far superior effort. — James Berardinelli

I credit the motion picture industry as the strongest environmental factor in molding the children of my day. — Lenny Bruce

There was much to put out of his mind. Why was it difficult to forget Chekov's astonished delight which greeted him at the command airlock when he boarded. And on the bridge - Kirk! The mere name made Spock groan inwardly as he remembered what it had cost him to turn away from that welcome. T'hy'la! — Gene Roddenberry

So it can be seen that the trouble with the motion picture art was (and is) that it is too much an industry; and the trouble with the motion picture industry is that it is too much an art. It is out of this basic contradiction that most of the ills of the form arise. — Garson Kanin

At best Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest. — Ralph Ellison

I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks. — Thomas A. Edison

I'm always looking for a kind of new musical entity to sort of move into a motion picture venue. — Brian De Palma

Not only is the motion picture an art, but it is the one entirely new art that has been evolved on this planet for hundreds of years. It is the only art at which we of this generation have any possible chance to greatly excel. — Raymond Chandler

The world that you see is like a motion picture. We are engrossed in a film and we have forgotten that we're sitting in a movie theatre. — Frederick Lenz

The eleventh commandment of a motion picture negotiation: Thou shalt not take less than thy last deal. — John Gregory Dunne

In the new alchemy, we have a similar kind of way of thinking. Our internal space includes our intuitions, our thoughts, our senses and our feelings, and from these we construct or build a picture of the outside world. From intuition and thought, we construct time. We also construct space from thought and our sensations. From our senses and our feelings, we experience energy, and from our intuitions and our feelings, we experience motion. — Fred Alan Wolf

I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company. — Walt Disney

When I think of excellence in motion, I think of the big picture. Because of the magnitude of this concept, I look at it from an aerial perspective. It is a mindset that challenges the boundaries of self-induced limits - that point where you aspire to exceed your expectations, where the mind-body-achievement connection resides and wins time and time again. — Lorii Myers

I see the experience of pictures as a kind of cycle, a kind of circular motion in which you're in the world, then you enter the picture and you're in a different world (it's not the same as the one you live in, but recognizable as one you might live in). And then you're returned to your world with an enlarged sense of its possibilities. — Frank Gohlke

Like the skyscraper, the automobile, and the motion-picture palace, neon signs once symbolized popular hopes for a new era of technological achievement and commercial abundance. From the 1920s to the 1950s, neon-lit streets pulsed with visual excitement from Vancouver to Miami. — Virginia Postrel

The geniuses who conduct the motion-picture business killed glamour when they decided that what the public wanted was not dream stuff, from which movies used to be made, but realism. — Hedda Hopper

WILSON RAWLS was born on a small farm in the Oklahoma Ozarks. He spent his youth in the heart of the Cherokee nation, prowling the hills and river bottoms with his only companion, an old bluetick hound. Rawls's first writing was done with his fingers in the dust of the country roads and in the sands along the river, and his earliest stories were told to his dog. Not until Rawls's family moved to Muskogee and he could attend high school did he encounter books. Where the Red Fern Grows has become a modern classic and has been made into a widely acclaimed motion picture. — Wilson Rawls

The brains of members of the Press departments of motion-picture studios resemble soup at a cheap restaurant. It is wiser not to stir them. — P.G. Wodehouse

Your responsibility as a parent is not as great as you might imagine. You need not supply the world with the next conqueror of disease or major motion picture star. If your child simply grows up to be someone who does not use the word "collectible" as a noun, you can consider yourself an unqualified success. — Fran Lebowitz

You can't teach anyone. You can't tell anyone. That's the thing you have to sit down and experience in order for it to mean anything. You can't intellectualize it. It's like why movies are cool. It's a combination of pictures and design and acting and music can create an experience that is outside of the experience that you can actually have in reality, which gets to my motion picture philosophy. People are like, 'aren't you trying to make the movies as real as you can?' — Zack Snyder

Rock n' roll unchained a nation and revolutionized radio and the record industry, not to mention the motion picture business. — Henry Rollins

The English should give Ireland home rule - and reserve the motion picture rights. — Will Rogers

My main object in making a motion picture is entertainment. If at the same time I can strike a blow for liberty, then I'll stick one in. — John Wayne

My folks always let me go to the movies every Saturday. We were really motion-picture goers. — John Wayne

Westerns are closer to art than anything else in the motion picture business. — John Wayne

Because psychologists have been able to discover, exactly as in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires knowledge and habits, the normal child has been vastly helped by what the retarded have taught us. — Pearl S. Buck

I am one day going to be working openly in the motion picture industry. When that day comes, I swear to you that I will never sign a term contract with any major studio. — Dalton Trumbo

The Birds could be the most terrifying motion picture I have ever made. — Alfred Hitchcock

How can a motion picture reflect real life when it is made by people who are living artificial lives? — Miriam Hopkins

Nothing is more intriguing than a still photograph in the middle of a motion picture ... Just as an accident is a cry changed into silence and not a silence after a cry, photography is speed rendered motionless ... — Jean Cocteau

The Fae book was definitely filled with the same stories as hers, but this one was filled with picture after picture of Jared. She couldn't help but flip backward a few pages and see magical images come to life: of Jared defending her in an alley. Sitting in art class with Mina, spinning on the pottery wheel. There was another one of Jared by the lake, teaching her to fight. Jared and her in the storage room, laughing, before their tickling fight. She flipped forward and saw the last page filled with a motion-captured image of Jared and her sharing a kiss. — Chanda Hahn

The director is the channel through which a motion picture reaches the screen. — King Vidor

Anyone who would let Gary Cooper and the entire cast go charging on horseback without first finding out what kind of footing the horses had is nuts and cannot possibly direct a motion picture. — Dick York

The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom. — Raymond Chandler

The Cosmic Director has written His own plays, and assembled the tremendous casts for the pageant of the centuries. From the dark booth of eternity, He pours His creative beam through the films of successive ages, and the pictures are thrown on the screen of space. Just as the motion-picture images appear to be real, but are only combinations of light and shade, so is the universal variety a delusive seeming. The planetary spheres, with their countless forms of life, are naught but figures in a cosmic motion picture, temporarily true to five sense perceptions as the scenes are cast on the screen of man's consciousness by the infinite creative beam. — Paramahansa Yogananda

After moving to Los Angeles in the early '90s, I started looking into "music for picture" more seriously and in broader scope. My collaboration as a programmer and arranger with Graeme Revell exposed me for the first time to the full spectrum of film music, including the hectic demands of orchestral scoring and the power politics surrounding the finalization of any score for a major motion picture in Hollywood. — Paul Haslinger

The conscience of America seems to be paralyzed ... We seem to be insensible to the things that are now taking place on motion picture screens and on the news stands that are constantly stimulating our young people. — Billy Graham

Can anything be less cool than defending the motion picture academy? — Steve Erickson

If I depended on the critics' judgment and recognition, I'd never have gone into the motion-picture business. — John Wayne

I sincerely hope that I shall always be a credit to my race, and to the motion picture industry. — Hattie McDaniel

I'd be ( ... ) lying there on my back with my clothes on and looking up at the ceiling and watching the cigarette smoke flow up slow and splash against the ceiling like the upside-down slow-motion moving picture of the ghost of a waterfall or like the pale uncertain spirit rising up out of your mouth on the last exhalation, the way the Egyptians figured it, to leave the horizontal tenement of clay in its ill-fitting pants and vest. — Robert Penn Warren

The mindset that I have on every project I take on is, 'How do I make this interesting enough for me to want to stop and look at it?' So in that regard, what I do behind the camera, whether it's still or motion picture, is the same. — Aaron Ruell

The entire universe is God's cosmic motion picture, and that individuals are merely actors in the divine play who change roles through reincarnation; mankind's deep suffering is rooted in identifying too closely with one's current role, rather than with the movie's director, or God. — Paramahansa Yogananda

I give a percentage of the earnings to the Motion Picture Home. — James MacArthur

The coming of the motion picture was as important as that of the printing press. — William Randolph Hearst

The Screen Directors Guild was organized solely by and for the motion picture director ... We are not anti-anything: The Guild being formed for the purpose of assisting and improving the director's work in the form of a collective body, rather than as an individual, as was necessary in the past. — King Vidor

Every race man and woman should cast aside their skepticism regarding the Negro's ability as a motion picture star. — Oscar Micheaux

I shall not attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description (of pornography), and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that. — Potter Stewart

Motion Picture Soundtrack on Kid A was another Coltrane inspiration. — Colin Greenwood

There are 80 jobs in which women earn more than men - positions like financial analyst, speech-language pathologist, radiation therapist, library worker, biological technician, motion picture projectionist. — Warren Farrell

The thing about a motion picture is that look of film on a big screen takes you into a magical. — Billy Bob Thornton

All religions are branches of one big tree. It doesn't matter what you call Him just as long as you call. Just as cinematic images appear to be real but are only combinations of light and shade, so is the universal variety a delusion. The planetary spheres, with their countless forms of life, are naught but figures in a cosmic motion picture. One's values are profoundly changed when he is finally convinced that creation is only a vast motion picture and that not in, but beyond, lies his own ultimate reality. — George Harrison

The most important person in the motion picture process is the writer ... and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from ever realizing it. — Irving Thalberg

Officially, MPAA stands for Motion Picture Association of America, but I suggest that MPAA stands for Malicious Power Attacking All. — Richard Stallman

I think the motion picture industry is a stupid business and I despise acting the scenes in short snatches, one at a time. I hate this film work. I am disgusted with myself. On the stage I could never play a part unless I felt it with all my heart and soul. — Conrad Veidt

You don't want to be like the motion picture exec who had so many people at his funeral, but they were there just make sure he was dead. Or how about the guy who, at his funeral, the priest said, "Won't anyone stand up and say anything nice for the deceased?" and finally someone said, "Well, his brother was worse." — Charlie Munger

Every industry has standards. For example, the motion picture camera, there are 2 or 3 film formats with a number of brackets and number of speed, a shooting speed that is standard. If we didn't have that, then some motion pictures will play back too slowly, and people would talk very slowly, and it will be bizarre. — Jeffrey Zeldman

SUMMARY In this chapter we have focused on three ways to analyze and solve communication problems - through component, transactional, and life-space analysis. Component analysis uses a "snapshot" approach to study the speaker, the message, and the listener. Transactional analysis takes a "motion picture" review of the way communication partners respond to each other (as an Adult, Parent, or Child). Life-space analysis takes a "panoramic" view of the environment or total situation which affects the way a person — Paul W. Swets

My mom was a screenwriter. I saw a lot of people who didn't seem very fulfilled creatively or otherwise by their roles in the motion picture industry. — Matthew Specktor

And because they had mass, they became simpler," said Beatty. "Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?" "I think so." Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. "Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending." "Snap ending." Mildred nodded. "Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. — Ray Bradbury

A motion picture, or music, or television, they have to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience. Other forms of mass media cost too much to produce a risk reaching only a limited audience. Only one person. But a book ... A book is cheap to print and bind. A book is as private and consensual as sex. A book takes time and effort to consume - something that gives a reader every chance to walk away. Actually, so few people make the effort to read that it's difficult to call books a "mass medium." No one really gives a damn about books. No one has bothered to ban a book in decades. — Chuck Palahniuk

His existence had always been comfortable, he had always held a clear picture of himself, his duties, and his place in a world. He saw that world as a place so full of turning gears he had no hope of comprehending how things fit together, so why even try?
Now things were different, however. Now he wasn't just looking out from inside of the clockwork. Instead, he was actually seeing the final motion of the escapement - the ticking hands of the clock itself.
And it was a doomsday clock.
Both his feline and human instincts told him to let it be. It was not his problem, or his place to interfere. If the living world was destined to fall, let it happen, let it pass into history once and for all. Who was he to try to save it?
But on the other hand, if the living world were lost, then there would never again be great cats to furjack ... and couldn't it be that hearing the actual ticking of the clock gave one the responsibility to stop it? — Neal Shusterman

A myth is a fantasy, a preferred lie, a foundational story, a hypnotic trance, an identity game, a virtual reality, one that can be either inspirational or despairing. It is a story in which I cast myself; it is my inner cinema, the motion picture of my inner reality - one that moves all the time. No diagnosis can fix the myth, no cure can settle it, because our inner life is precisely what, in us, will not lie still. — Ginette Paris

Motion picture making is a very, very involved affair. It is completely my baby. I'm a thorough professional. I plan films right from the conception of an idea to its final execution. — Dev Anand

Good work is good work wherever it's done, in a play, a motion picture or television, and that includes commercials. — Parker Stevenson

If I want to pursue the art of painting - or music or writing or sculpture - it requires only my time and a few dollars for materials. If, however, I want to produce a motion picture I have to go out and raise a million dollars! — Orson Welles

I no longer look at my life and times in the motion picture industry as my career. I just look at it now as something I like and want to do. — Kurt Russell

Why not pick up the new full-length motion picture at the corner drugstore and then run it through one's
home TV receiver? — Jack Gould

This reminded him of Alvis Bender's contention that stories were like nations - Italy, a great epic poem, Britain, a thick novel, America, a brash motion picture in technicolor ... — Jess Walter

When you make motion pictures, each picture is a life unto itself. When you finish and the picture is over, there's an understanding, a realization that we'll never be assembled this way again. That these relationships are severed forever and ever. And each of these films is a little life. — John Huston

We seem to know when to 'tap the heart.' Others have hit the intellect. We can hit them in all emotional way. Those who appeal to the intellect only appeal to a very limited group. The real thing behind this is: we are in the motion picture business, only we are drawing them instead of photographing them. — Walt Disney

Nobody knows anything ... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one. — William Goldman

I think fashion in motion is going to happen. I think that's the way things are going, but there are people who will still want to see a picture and to be able to hold it. — Kate Moss

Our specialty was exasperated dignity and the discombombulation of Authority. — Mack Sennett

Of all the things I've done in life, directing a motion picture is the most beautiful. It's the most exciting and the nearest than an interpretive craftsman, such as an actor can possibly get to being a creator. — Laurence Olivier

Horace, however, had arrayed himself in a Gothic assortment of crushed velvet, black satin, and patent leather that shouldn't have been allowed in my view. He might as well have I AM A VAMPIRE embroidered across the front of his watered-silk waistcoat. An outfit like that is going to get him staked one of these days; it's exactly what Boris Karloff would have worn, if he had joined the cast of Rocky Horror Motion Picture Show. — Catherine Jinks

It's not Comic Con any more. It's this huge marketplace for the motion picture and television industry. And the toy manufacturer's and the game people. One of the problems with International Comic Con is that tickets go on sale for the next year's event and the place is full of thousands and thousands of kids who have scraped together every dime to get admittance because they want to get all the freebies. — Mike Royer

The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation. Because pictures are made to meet market demands, they reflect, emphasize and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies, rather than stimulate new ideas and opinions. The motion picture avails itself only of ideas and facts which are in vogue. As the newspaper seeks to purvey news, it seeks to purvey entertainment. — Edward Bernays

When AI approximates Machine Intelligence, then many online and computer-run RPGs will move towards actual RPG activity. Nonetheless, that will not replace the experience of 'being there,' any more than seeing a theatrical motion picture can replace the stage play. — Gary Gygax

The man who has perceived God looks upon all types of men as dream motion-picture images, made of the relativities of the light of Cosmic Consciousness and the shadows of delusion. — Paramahansa Yogananda

Who doesn't have a dark place somewhere inside him that comes out sometimes when he's looking in a mirror? Dark and light, we are all made out of shadows like the shapes on a motion-picture screen. A lot of people think that the function of the projector is to throw light on the screen, just as the function of the story-teller is to stop fooling around and simply tell what happened, but the dark places must be there too, because without the dark places there would be no image and the figure on the screen would not exist. — MacDonald Harris

I'm a guy whose first motion picture experience was seeing Ridley Scott glide past on a camera on a hundred and fifty million dollar film, and prep two movies, and there is no way to overstate that when you've worked with Ridley, it's like having been a quarterdeck lieutenant to Lord Nelson. — William Monahan

I would love to do a Broadway play. I would love to do big screen also, motion picture. — LaToya London

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, fellow members of the motion picture industry and honored guests: This is one of the happiest moments of my life, and I want to thank each one of you who had a part in selecting me for one of their awards, for your kindness. It has made me feel very, very humble; and I shall always hold it as a beacon for anything that I may be able to do in the future. I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry. My heart is too full to tell you just how I feel, and may I say thank you and God bless you. — Hattie McDaniel

I grew up in Hollywood, California. A lot of my parents' friends were in the motion picture industry, but I saw their doctor friends as more solid. I admired them; there was a peacefulness in them, a sense of purpose that I liked. So I became very interested in being a surgeon. — Spencer Johnson

The major media companies are significantly reducing their financial commitment to the motion picture sector. — Peter Bart

The mind can be thought of as containing reels and reels of motion picture film about our past experiences. These images are superimposed not only on each other but also on the lens through which we experience the present. — Gerald Jampolsky

Every Pixar movie at one time was the worst motion picture ever made. — John Lasseter

Life is like a motion picture, everything is like a movie. In one of my rhymes I say, "My life is like a movie/Directed by King Louie". — King Louie

Dialectical thought is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion. — Leon Trotsky

Suppose every photo of me ever taken was an infinitesimal piece? Every magazine ad, every negative, every frame of motion picture film - another tiny molecule of me, stolen away to feed an audience that is *never* satiated. And when someone is fully consumed - vampirized - they move on, still hungry, to pick their next victim by making him or her a star. That's why they're called consumers. ("Red Light") — David J. Schow

I'd thought of myself as a great big motion picture star from the time I was 6. — Loretta Young

Loopy as the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system is, it's better than what you'd probably get by putting such decisions in the federal government hands. — Timothy Noah

Motion-picture studio floors used to be all wooden and not smooth at all. This was difficult when moving a camera around on a dolly. — Desi Arnaz