Mankiewicz's Quotes

#1. There are millions to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let thisget around.

Herman J. Mankiewicz

#2. So many people know me.
I wish I did.
I wish someone would tell me about me.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

#3. [Writers are] the highest paid secretaries in the world.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

#4. I got a job at Metro and went in to see Louis Mayer, who told me he wanted me to be a producer. I said I wanted to write and direct. He said, No, you have to produce first, you have to crawl before you can walk. Which is as good a definition of producing as I ever heard.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

#5. I've been in on the beginning, the rise, peak, collapse and end of the talking picture.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

#6. In a novel, the hero can lay ten girls and marry a virgin for the finish. In a movie, that is not allowed. The villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun and as he wants cheating, stealing, getting rich, and whipping servants. But you have to shoot him in the end.

Herman J. Mankiewicz

#7. Dance, theatre, etc. as art, will disappear along with the dominating 'expression' of tragedy and harmony: the movement of life itself will become harmonious.

Piet Mondrian

#8. If people don't sit at Chaplin's feet, he goes out and stands where they are sitting.

Herman J. Mankiewicz

#9. The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

#10. There, but for the grace of God, goes God.

Herman J. Mankiewicz

#11. I'm not biting my fingernails.
I'm biting my knuckles.
I finished the fingernails months ago.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

#12. You know it's hard to hear what a bearded man is saying. He can't speak above a whisker.

Herman J. Mankiewicz

#13. There's nothing as real as money.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

#14. A point contains more unknowns than anything else; it need but stir, move, and it may turn into thousands of curves, thousands of bodies. I

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#15. The amount of quaint, authentic, rustic charm varies inversely with the pounds per square inch of water pressure in the shower.

Frank Mankiewicz

#16. Please don't look at me as if you had a source of income other than your salary.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

#17. Every screenwriter worthy of the name has already directed his film when he has written his script.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

#18. Imagine
the whole world wired to Harry Cohn's ass!

Herman J. Mankiewicz

#19. Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night!

Herman J. Mankiewicz

#20. This was one of those non-glamorous parts about college that people never tell you about - worrying that the dilapidated apartment hosting a party would fall apart with you in it.

Alyssa Rose Ivy

#21. And Kate Hepburn-God, she's beautiful, God, she plays golf well, God, she can get anyone in the world on the phone, God, she knows what to do all the time, God, she wears clothes well.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

#22. We are a breed apart from the rest of humanity, we theatre folk.We are the original displaced personalities, concentrated gatherings of neurotics, egomaniacs, emotional misfits and precocious children.

Herman J. Mankiewicz

#23. I'm a schoolteacher. That's even worse than being an intellectual. Schoolteachers are not only comic, they're often cold and hungry in this richest land on earth.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

#24. All playwrights should be dead for three hundred years.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

#25. I had once read, in one of those pre-plague books in the library, that love was bearing witness. That it was the act of watching someone's life, of simply being there to say: you're life is worth seeing.

Anna Carey

#26. Ignore everything a politician says before the word but.

Frank Mankiewicz

#27. Mankiewicz was a brilliant director.

Richard Widmark

#28. I am a critic - as essential to the theatre as ants to a picnic.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

#29. A sip is the most than mortals are permitted from any goblet of delight.

Amos Bronson Alcott

#30. John Connally's conversion to the GOP raised the intellectual level of both parties.

Frank Mankiewicz

#31. In my last two years in high school, my face was pocked with pimples, I stammered when I spoke; if I made a mistake, I blushed furiously, and when nervous, as I was in the company of girls, I perspired freely.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

#32. My brother is a professional boxer. Heavyweight? No, featherweight. He tickles his opponents to death!

Various

#33. The president of the United States can't even fire his chef. I'm not kidding.

Rob Lowe

#34. As a divorced man, I can say from experience that there may come a time when a couple decides it is best to live separate lives: where you have different dreams and are no longer willing to make sacrifices to achieve the other's goal.

Carlos Wallace

#35. Give up to grace. The ocean takes care of each wave 'til it gets to shore. You need more help than you know.

Rumi

#36. When I turned 30, I realised the value of time and with it, the other important things in life. That's when I did up my house, started spending time with my family and friends and did all that a normal girl would do. All these things I was balancing with my work.

Rani Mukerji

#37. There is no such thing as realistic dialogue. If you [simply recorded] the real conversation of any people and played it back from the stage, it would be impossible to listen to. It would be redundant ... The good dialogue writer is the one who can give you the impression of real speech.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

#38. Some people think God is going to guide those humans. The Oneida community and the Shakers both believed that they had received revelations about how to build the New Jerusalem that the Bible says is coming

Christine Jennings