Preston Sturges Quotes

#1. 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

#2. It's pretty easy in theatre. The comedy's either physical or verbal, and you're looking at the whole frame at once. But TV executives want close-ups. I keep telling them to look at Preston Sturges' movies. He'll do a whole scene without a cut in it, and it's a riot.

Don Scardino

#3. Think of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. They used the same actors over and over again.

Matthew Modine

#4. Preston Sturges is one of my favorites. I learned about dialogue and timing from him - louder, faster, funnier. But I do love Mel Brooks.

Clara Mamet

#5. I never write down to my audiences. I respect honest sentiment and honest pratfalls.

Preston Sturges

#6. If war is the solution, why didn't Roosevelt declare war on poverty?

Preston Sturges

#7. JEAN
I need him like the axe needs the turkey.
HARRINGTON
Don't be vulgar, Jean. Let us be crooked, but never common.

Preston Sturges

#8. The most incredible thing about my career is that I had one.

Preston Sturges

#9. I compared pooh-poohers of the movies to the myopics who used to holler, 'Get a horse!' when an early automobile exploded by.

Preston Sturges

#10. I did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay. It was probably harder for a regular director. He probably had to read the script the night before shooting started.

Preston Sturges

#11. The hook is a word or an idea spoken by one character which gives the next character something to hook onto when he responds or, like a trapeze artist, gives him something to swing from on his way to another point of view.

Preston Sturges

#12. You can't go around the theatres handing out cards saying, 'It isn't my fault'. You go onto the next one.

Preston Sturges

#13. The more nearly the film cutter approaches the natural law of interest, the more invisible will be his cutting. If the camera moves from one person to another at the exact moment that you in the legitimate theatre would have turned your head, you will not be conscious of a cut.

Preston Sturges

#14. I should have had the pickle.

Preston Sturges

#15. I am quite sure that a little man who braves ridicule to improve the lot of his fellow men, and is thanked by their jibes, is an interesting character.

Preston Sturges

#16. I thought for a month or so along the lines of what I call Monsieur Beaucaire in modern clothes. By that, I mean a hero who is believed by all to be a villain but who, in the end, is introduced as a man of great honor with a long list of decorations.

Preston Sturges

#17. Despite my express wish, I was not left in Chicago, but taken to Paris to live, and I did not see my father for many years. But we never stopped loving each other, and in 1940 he died in my arms in Hollywood, where he had come to be near me at the end.

Preston Sturges

#18. Of the Sturges family, much more is known than is available about poor Irish immigrants and obscure Scottish-English settlers around Rochester.

Preston Sturges

#19. Theater in which you eat is the oldest form of theater.

Preston Sturges

#20. Our gymnasium was remarkable and had more stuff in it than one could dream up in a nightmare. Furthermore, every boy had to use every piece of it during gymnasium class.

Preston Sturges

#21. In 'Remember the Night,' love reformed her and corrupted him, which gave us the finely balanced moral that one man's meat is another man's poison.

Preston Sturges

#22. By the very nature of his art, which depends on invention and innovation, a story teller must depart from the beaten track and, having done so, occasionally startle and disagree with some of his associates. Healthy disagreement we must have.

Preston Sturges

#23. I don't believe environment has the slightest bit to do with anything - I only believe in ancestral influence. It would have made no difference whether I'd been brought up in a reform school, or on the island of Lesbos.

Preston Sturges

#24. I always was and always will be optimistic.

Preston Sturges

#25. You know, Maude ... somebody meeting you for the first time
not knowing you were cracked
might get the wrong impression of you.

Preston Sturges

#26. GERRY
I would step on your face!
HACKENSACKER
That's quite all right, I rather enjoyed it.
GERRY
Twice!
HACKENSACKER
You made quite an impression.

Preston Sturges

#27. If I can't find real situations that interest me in real life, then I'll go and write them in play form.

Preston Sturges

#28. I go through life accumulating possessions ... I've always done it ... and then, every once in a while, a sort of tidal wave comes along and washes them all away.

Preston Sturges

#29. After I saw a couple of pictures put out by my fellow comedy-directors, which seemed to have abandoned the fun in favor of the message, I wrote Sullivan's Travels to satisfy an urge to tell them that they were getting a little too deep-dish, to leave the preaching to the preachers.

Preston Sturges

#30. The United States owes a great debt to its inventors. Far from being grateful to them, it places every obstruction in their way and makes it enormously difficult to secure a patent.

Preston Sturges

#31. How many years and how many pictures does it take to win the confidence of Paramount? How many years before my fellow workers say, 'I know he is doing his best?'

Preston Sturges

#32. That's one of the tragedies of this life - that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous.

Preston Sturges

#33. JEAN
Boy, would I like to see you give some old harpie the three in one!
COLONEL
Don't be vulgar, Jane. Let us be crooked, but never common.

Preston Sturges

#34. I have never done anything but my very best work for anyone, and to do this and retain my first fine enthusiasm over a period of thirty years has required a rather special set of working conditions.

Preston Sturges

#35. Film is the greatest educational medium the world has ever known.

Preston Sturges

#36. I worked out a rather deep-dish theory defining the theater as a form of architecture rather than a form of literature.

Preston Sturges

#37. I have always wondered why the movie industry was so firmly persuaded that the original author could be of no possible help in the case of a remake or any other change in a work.

Preston Sturges

#38. The camera must point at the exact spot the audience wishes to look at any given moment. To find that spot is absurdly easy: you only have to remember where you were looking at the time the scene was made.

Preston Sturges

#39. Paris Singer had vastly more to do with shaping my character than Mother had; although Mother made innumerable sacrifices for me, and Paris Singer made none. I wanted to be like him.

Preston Sturges

#40. It was actually the enormous risks I took with my pictures, skating right up to the edge of non-acceptance, that paid off so handsomely.

Preston Sturges

#41. Though I believe in God, I don't believe in religion for everybody. Some people who are a little weak and don't want to shoulder any responsibility need Catholicism. For people at the other extreme, there is Christian Science ... I think a powerful conscience is worth all the religions put together.

Preston Sturges

#42. When the last dime is gone, I'll sit on the curb outside with a pencil and a ten cent notebook and start the whole thing over again.

Preston Sturges

#43. Now I've laid me down to die I pray my neighbors not to pry Too deeply into sins that I Not only cannot here deny But much enjoyed as life flew by.

Preston Sturges

#44. Much as I disliked the un-American idea of marrying a lady with a dowry, I must admit that little Mrs. Godfrey's little private income put everything in a faintly different light.

Preston Sturges

#45. This is the story of two men who met in a banana republic. One of them never did anything dishonest in his life except for one crazy minute. The other never did anything honest in his life except for one crazy minute.

Preston Sturges

#46. According to my mother, positively no one, least of all herself, had even the faintest suspicion that she was heavy with child at the time of my birth.

Preston Sturges

#47. I did not think that a good movie was the equivalent of a good stage play, any more than I thought an automobile ride was as exhilarating as a drive behind a spirited horse, nor a trip by steam as soul-satisfying as a voyage by sail.

Preston Sturges

#48. For a southern belle, my grandmother was remarkably modern. She threw my grandfather out, for one thing - some kind of argument about bourbon whiskey - shortly after the birth of their third child, and then went back to school to get herself a teaching certificate.

Preston Sturges

#49. It is probably a very good thing for a boy to learn to live with enmity, as opposed to an atmosphere of love and affection, as it hardens him and gives him a taste of what he is going to run into later in life.

Preston Sturges

#50. The more you stand in the limelight, the more scarred you will become and the more you will love the limelight.

Preston Sturges

#51. Directing was easy for me because I was a writer director and did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay.

Preston Sturges