"I'm here to make good pictures. If I don't see it, I won't touch it. I may not make a good picture, but I still gotta believe in it!" "Stills belong in the lobby, not on the screen." "It's eighty percent script and twenty percent you get great actors. There's nothing else to it." "It's a miserable life in Hollywood. You're up at five or six o'clock in the morning to be ready to start shooting at nine. The working hours aren't arranged to suit the artists and the directors; they're for the convenience of the technicians. If you go to a party at night, you'll never find anyone there who's shooting a picture; they're all home in bed." "If anybody doubts my loyalty to my country, I'll punch him in the nose, and I don't care how old he is." "I made over forty Westerns. I used to lie awake nights trying to think up new ways of getting on and off a horse." [on why he turned down the offer to direct The Sound of Music] "I just can't bear to make a picture about all those nice Nazis". [Responding to co-stars' complaints about the imperious behavior of star Barbra Streisand--with whom he had had his own clashes--and her habit of telling other actors what to do and how to act on the set of Funny Girl, her very first film] "You'll have to forgive Barbra; this is the first picture she's ever directed."