Warren Beatty

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

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.

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.

I sometimes feel I have met everyone he ever met, but I never met him. I am afraid to say I have always been - the word I would have to use is - amused by Howard Hughes.

When I came to Hollywood, I would take the opportunity to get to know George Stevens or Willy Wyler or Billy Wilder or Freddie Zinnemann. David Lean I got to know, of course, in London. And David Selznick and Darryl Zanuck, not to mention Jack Warner, and Sam Goldwyn was actually very, very nice to me.

I was studying with Stella Adler, who was a great, great teacher who encouraged me to be an actor. I had thought I would just write or direct or whatever. I wasn't thinking very much of Hollywood. I was thinking only of the legitimate theatre. But then I changed.

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.'

I have been famous for a long time.

I'm slow at everything I do.

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

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

I'd rather ride down the street on a camel than give what is sometimes called an 'in-depth' interview.

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

I don't want to be mushy about it, but having four kids is definitely the best thing that has ever happened to me, and each kid is, to me, more fascinating than any five movies.

I actually knew Adlai Stevenson and Jack and Bobby Kennedy.

Art is truth.

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

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.

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.

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

I don't know that any of us can control our own image. We are what other people see.

Invented memory is a subject that fascinates me.

Character is plot, and casting is character.

The unconscious is much smarter than the conscious.

I think I've been lucky enough not to have to do movie after movie after movie for financial reasons, so I've been able to live life and also make movies. I didn't have to grind them out. I could go long periods where I was living life rather than tripping over cables.