"No man can be a genius in slapshoes and a flat hat." "The only person who has the right attitude about boxing in the movies for me was Buster Keaton." - Martin Scorsese, director of Raging Bull (1980) "Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot." "I gotta do some sad scenes. Why, I never tried to make anybody cry in my life! And I go 'round all the time dolled up in kippie clothes-wear everything but a corset...can't stub my toe in this picture nor anything! Just imagine having to play-act all the time without ever getting hit with anything!" [When told to cheer up at an MGM film premiere. The reporter asked "Are you happy to be here?"] "Of course, I got off location for this! "What really got my gulp at MGM were comedians like The Marx Brothers who never wrote their own jokes." [Commenting on his pre-1928 days] "When we made a picture we ate, slept and dreamed them." "Is Hollywood the cruelest city in the world? Well, it can be. New York can be like that, too. You can be a Broadway star here one night, and something happens, and then you're out - nobody knows you on the street. They forget you ever lived. It happens in Hollywood, too." "The first thing I did in the studio was to want to tear that camera to pieces. I had to know how that film got into the cutting room, what you did to it in there, how you projected it, how you finally got the picture together, how you made things match. The technical part of pictures is what interested me. Material was the last thing in the world I thought about. You only had to turn me loose on the set and I'd have material in two minutes, because I'd been doing it all my life." "They say pantomime's a lost art. It's never been a lost art and never will be, because it's too natural to do." "It was an event when you could get all three of them on the set at the same time. The minute you started a picture with the Marx brothers you hired three assistant directors. One for each Marx brother. You had two of 'em while you went to look for the third one and the first two would disappear." - on his time working as an uncredited gag writer for the Marx Brothers at MGM "Think slow, act fast."