Top 81 Mike Nichols Quotes
#2. As a director, my job is, and always has been, divided into a number of things: dealing with the crew, the money and the studio, and the marketing and publicity. These are all different jobs that have to be learned and done as well as possible. The celebrity part rarely touches a director.
Mike Nichols
#3. If you want to be a legend, God help you, it's so easy. You just do one thing. You can be the master of suspense, say. But if you want to be as invisible as is practical, then it's fun to do a lot of different things.
Mike Nichols
#4. The thing about being an outsider ... is that it teaches you to hear what people are thinking because you're constantly looking for the people who just don't give a damn.
Mike Nichols
#5. I love the editing process of making movies. I just wish that life had one.
Mike Nichols
#6. I've learned that many of the worst things lead to the best things, that no great thing is achieved without a couple of bad, bad things on the way to them, and that the bad things that happen to you bring, in some cases, the good things.
Mike Nichols
#7. When we talk about reviews, what we are really talking about is just a market report - it's like reading about the new Lexus. You have to know what the guy writing the review cares about to understand his take. Does he like sports cars, or does he like Bentleys?
Mike Nichols
#8. The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.
Mike Nichols
#9. Directing is mystifying. It's a long, long, skid on an icy road, and you do the best you can trying to stay on the road ... If you're still here when you come out of the spin, it's a relief. But you've got to have the terror if you're going to do anything worthwhile.
Mike Nichols
#10. I was just trying to make a nice little movie ... It wasn't until I saw it all put together that I realized this was something remarkable.
Mike Nichols
#11. The only safe thing in filmmaking is to take a chance.
Mike Nichols
#12. Chicago is not a very fashion-driven place. Nobody says, 'Oh, you've got to come see these fabulous people!' Nobody cares.
Mike Nichols
#13. I think the main thing about comedy and humor is that it's impossible and always was impossible to define.
Mike Nichols
#14. There are absolutely almost perfect people who experience no guilt; they don't know what it is. They simply do what they need to do - or want to do - next. They see nothing wrong with it. They feel no guilt. They express no guilt. And it's not even certain what harm they do.
Mike Nichols
#15. I have never understood people dividing things into dramas and comedies,
Mike Nichols
#16. I don't know that a political climate - as long as it's still a free country - makes much difference in the film world.
Mike Nichols
#17. I loved all movies, literally. I certainly loved 'Shane' and 'Roxie Hart.' Later on, when I was less of a kid, I loved 'L'Avventura' and 'Persona' and all Fellini movies and like everybody else I loved John Ford. Then and now, I loved Preston Sturges, maybe above anyone.
Mike Nichols
#18. Limitations are inspiring: they lead to thinking, so I don't mind them.
Mike Nichols
#19. Plays, especially great plays, yield their secrets over a long period of time. You can't read it three times and say, 'OK, I got it. I know what's happening.'
Mike Nichols
#20. I was standing right behind Marilyn, completely invisible, when she sang 'Happy birthday, Mr. President.' And indeed, the corny thing happened: Her dress split for my benefit, and there was Marilyn, and yes, indeed, she didn't wear any underwear.
Mike Nichols
#21. Nerves provide me with energy ... It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that's when I get worried.
Mike Nichols
#22. I came to love silence, because it's so rare, and it's now my favorite aural condition.
Mike Nichols
#23. In a weird way, when I was looking back, I didn't know I was going to be a director until I was.
Mike Nichols
#24. The producers want us to sell, sell, sell. That's my little joke. That's what we do by day; by night, we're artists.
Mike Nichols
#25. Here's the most mysterious thing to me. I look back at those first plays I did and the first movies I did, and I only have one question, which is, 'What was I so confident about? Where did I get that?
Mike Nichols
#26. All movies are pure process. A commercial movie isn't less process than an art movie. You can't make your decisions about a film on the basis of, 'Is it important enough? Is it serious enough?' It's either alive or it's not for me. If it's alive, I want to do it.
Mike Nichols
#27. I still think that luck is what a lot of the good things come from. It's simply the luck of where you are, when.
Mike Nichols
#28. The greatest thrill is that moment when a thousand people are sitting in the dark, looking at the same scene, and they are all apprehending something that has not been spoken. That's the thrill of it, the miracle - that's what holds us to movies forever. It's what we wish we could do in real life.
Mike Nichols
#30. Stand-up comedy is a very hard thing on the spirit. There are people who transcend it, like Jack Benny and Steve Martin, but in its essence, it's soul-destroying. It tends to turn people into control freaks.
Mike Nichols
#31. Jewish introspection and Jewish humor is a way of surviving ... if you're not handsome and you're not athletic and you're not rich, there's still one last hope with girls, which is being funny.
Mike Nichols
#32. The degree to which you're peculiar and different is the degree to which you must learn to hear people thinking. Just in self-defense you have to learn, where is their kindness? Where is their danger? Where is their generosity?
Mike Nichols
#33. I'm in the theater because of two plays: 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and 'Death of a Salesman.'
Mike Nichols
#34. I used to say that winning the Oscar means being back at the Beverly Hills Hotel at 1 A.M. feeling empty. It's the industry voting. It doesn't come from God. It doesn't change your life, really.
Mike Nichols
#35. 'Catch-22' was a nightmare to make, and everybody was unhappy except me.
Mike Nichols
#36. A great thing is happening on cable TV. You see characters change in stories over years, like in Tolstoy. That's a whole, thrilling new form that I really enjoy. They are Tolstoy-an in their endless character development and narrative changes ... a show like 'Breaking Bad' is astonishing.
Mike Nichols
#37. I'm an enormous fan of 'The West Wing.' It was one of the very few shows I would watch every week.
Mike Nichols
#38. We are being entertained all the time - in the bathroom, on the train, in our beds. Sure, there is a smaller audience for theater. But we know from radio that entertainment never goes away, it just changes. And more power to it.
Mike Nichols
#39. A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.
Mike Nichols
#40. A play, after all, is a mystery. There's no narration. And as soon as there's no narration, it's open to interpretation. It must be interpreted. You don't have a choice ... Each play can become many things.
Mike Nichols
#41. I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That's the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.
Mike Nichols
#42. I asked a shrink: 'Everything is so great. Why am I still so angry?' He said, 'Anger doesn't go away.' I always thought it was kind of a good engine.
Mike Nichols
#43. Most great plays of the past lose their grip on immediacy; on application to our lives right now.
Mike Nichols
#44. I believed early and still believe that everybody who can act can do it already, just they don't know how and don't want to talk about it.
Mike Nichols
#45. Clay Aiken is amazing beyond that glorious voice. Turns out he is an excellent comic actor and a master of character.
Mike Nichols
#46. I think a director can make a play happen before your eyes so that you are part of it and it is part of you. If you can get it right, there's no mystery. It's not about mystery. It's not even mysterious. It's about our lives.
Mike Nichols
#47. It's not a film-maker's job to explain his technique, but to tell his story the best way he can.
Mike Nichols
#48. Fear of comedy is all so much about who you do it with.
Mike Nichols
#49. Never let people see what you want, because they will not let you have it. Never let anybody see what you feel, because it gives them too much power. You're probably better off not showing weakness whenever you can avoid it, because they'll go for you.
Mike Nichols
#50. I keep coming back to it, over and over - adultery and cheating. It's the most interesting problem in the theater. How else do you get Oedipus? That's the first cheating in the theater.
Mike Nichols
#51. My first memory in the world is my gym teacher ripping my mother's necklace off her neck and throwing it out the window and her running downstairs to go after it. I have no memory before that. I was 4. My father had a lot of girlfriends and my mother had a lot of boyfriends.
Mike Nichols
#52. The reason you do this stuff - comedy, plays, movies - is to be seized by something, to disappear in the service of an idea.
Mike Nichols
#53. It's very, very corrupting to the spirit, doing comedy. And you have to be almost a saint, like Jack Benny was, like Steve Martin is, to avoid the corrupting of it, because there's very little work where the actual work and the reward are simultaneous, and comedy is that.
Mike Nichols
#54. Whether something is a success or not has never had much to do with what you do next.
Mike Nichols
#55. My father wasn't too crazy about me. I loved him anyway. One of the things I regretted for a long time was that he died before he could see that he would be proud of me. I was actually more what he wished for than he thought.
Mike Nichols
#57. American society to me and my brother was thrilling because, first of all, the food made noise. We were so excited about Rice Krispies and Coca-Cola. We had only silent food in our country, and we loved listening to our lunch and breakfast.
Mike Nichols
#58. I am drawn to the mystery of marriage. You can never know what the contract is between two people, and that is a very strong subject. I think it may be my subject.
Mike Nichols
#59. I think that to make something alive, instead of on a page, is an honorable task. And it turns me on.
Mike Nichols
#60. People, by and large, would rather be talking than listening.
Mike Nichols
#61. You want to make money, remake 'Cinderella.' You want to move people, remake the Hippolytus and Phaedra myth.
Mike Nichols
#62. There's nothing in the American dream about character. It's a serious flaw.
Mike Nichols
#63. There's nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you're meant to do. It's like falling in love.
Mike Nichols
#64. Everybody wants to be known. Everybody's a Kardashian.
Mike Nichols
#65. As a little kid in a sometimes hard place, I went to the movies as often as I could. Movies - making them, seeing them - is not something that could ever lose its pleasure for me. That puts them on a short list of things that eternally give me joy - love, family, food, movies.
Mike Nichols
#66. The whole point about laughter is it's like mercury: you can't catch it, you can't catch what motivates it - that's why it's funny.
Mike Nichols
#67. You could say that it's in talking movies that inner life begins to appear. You can see things happen to the faces of people that were neither planned nor rehearsed.
Mike Nichols
#68. The things that you saw earlier in your life generally have more power than the things you saw last week.
Mike Nichols
#69. Oh my God, if I know anything, I know I'm gonna die! I never forget that. I know I'll be forgotten in a minute, and that's just fine with me.
Mike Nichols
#70. Technically, maybe I learned most of all from George Stevens, and among his movies I learned the most from 'A Place in the Sun.' It's a lesson in moviemaking.
Mike Nichols
#71. If you lose a parent, it never goes away. As a kid, I dreamed about my father coming back for 15 or 20 years. I still do sometimes.
Mike Nichols
#72. That seems to me the great American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.
Mike Nichols
#73. If you're fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 and you're a Jew, you don't think so much about relationships. People didn't have a lot of divorces during the Holocaust, for instance.
Mike Nichols
#74. For a director, a musical is a special kind of hell.
Mike Nichols
#75. It's the hardest thing on earth to like yourself, and then when you do, it's a catastrophe. I mean, the people I know who like themselves - I don't want to see them!
Mike Nichols
#77. It's very weird about movies: you never know which ones are going to stay alive and which one are going to be meaningless. When you're there, you couldn't possibly predict it. Some things slowly die, and others slowly stay a while.
Mike Nichols
#79. I don't expect anything from reviews. Sometimes I am bemused by them.
Mike Nichols
#80. Being with an insanely jealous person is like being in the room with a dead mammoth.
Mike Nichols
#81. Very often when a story really holds us, it gets pushed away because it's too close for comfort.
Mike Nichols
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