Top 95 Quotes About John Ford
#1. I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.
Orson Welles
#2. As a kid I watched the Academy Awards on television and always wanted one - or several - like one of my favorite directions, John Ford. He won six. On the other hand, Orson Welles, who's on the top of my list, didn't win any. Alfred Hitchcock didn't win any. Howard Hawks didn't win any.
Martin Scorsese
#3. If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.
Adam Haslett
#4. John Ford was so funny that I couldn't wait to go to work in the morning.
Richard Widmark
#5. When we say 'cinematic', we tend to think John Ford and vistas and wide-open spaces. Or we think of kinetic camera movement or of a certain number of cinematic styles, like film noir.
Lenny Abrahamson
#6. I worked for John Ford, Howard Hawks, Henry Hathaway, Raoul Walsh - I worked for some real good directors.
Richard Farnsworth
#7. When you try to battle with John Ford, you have to give in.
Maureen O'Hara
#8. I tend to lean more towards the Westerns of the 40s and 50s as opposed to the 60s and 70s. They get a little too drab for me when you get into the Spaghetti Western era. I love the John Ford movies. I love the music. I love the scope.
Seth MacFarlane
#9. [Akiro] Kurosawa, no doubt, was a big influence. Movies sometimes more than directors have influenced me: The Grapes of Wrath, by John Ford, was an extraordinary discovery. Sergei Eisenstein, of course. Later on, [Ingmar] Bergman.
Costa-Gavras
#10. The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white.
Jonathan Lethem
#11. My roommate at Yale University introduced me to the auteur theory of filmmaking. I soon became a big fan of the works of John Ford, Kenji Mizoguchi, Ernst Lubitsch, and Stan Brakhage. I then decided to make my own films!
Lloyd Kaufman
#12. One should make movies innocently - the way Adam and Eve named the animals, their first day in the garden ... Learn from your own interior vision of things, as if there had never been a D.W.Griffith, or a Eisenstein, or a [John] Ford, or a [Jean] Renoir, or anybody.
Orson Welles
#13. I think over the course of 14 films, I'm returning to a place that I know to tell a story ... the same way Spielberg returned to fantasy, Lucas returned to the 'Star Wars' saga, or John Ford returned to the western.
Gus Van Sant
#14. I love westerns. John Ford is one of the 10 best directors.
Winona Ryder
#15. I didn't even know what a film director was. To me, Charlie Chaplin was a goofy clown, and John Ford - what? Never heard of him.
Lloyd Kaufman
#16. I love researching, whether it's old Western documentaries or old Western country singers or John Ford Westerns, which are heavily influenced by family values, which so many of these country songs are related to.
Clifton Collins Jr.
#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. You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.
David Denby
#19. I like how you can go back and watch David Lean and John Ford and see the influence that had on Steven Spielberg, especially David Lean, in the camerawork, and yet, you don't watch any Spielberg movie and think of David Lean. Once you're looking for it, you see it all, but it's not in your face.
Colin Trevorrow
#20. The John Ford pictures I made are highly regarded, but at the time they didn't seem like that.
Gloria Stuart
#21. I saw Ben Stiller's movie Walter Mitty [2013]; it's very beautiful. You look at some of the movies John Ford did with John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, and then look at Remington and Ansel Adams, and I think you see a connection, certainly in the imagery of the West.
Owen Wilson
#22. When How Green Was My Valley finally wrapped, I thought John Ford was a walking god.
Maureen O'Hara
#23. I had always loved John Ford's pictures. And I came to love him, too, but I was frightened to death working for him. He used the shock treatment while directing me.
Ethel Waters
#24. I'd love to do a Western. A real Western like John Ford used to do. There's not too many of them made, so I don't know if I'll ever get to do that. They're awfully hard movies to make.
Dennis Farina
#25. I went to Europe with Spencer Tracy. What a thrill, working with John Ford when I was a kid.
Robert Wagner
#26. Frank Capra was a prop man, I think. John Ford was a prop man. It was a little bit of a father and son thing, and you kind of worked your way up.
Francis Ford Coppola
#27. I am ... a mushroom; On whom the dew of heaven drops now and then.
John Ford
#28. Most of the good things in pictures happen by accident
John Ford
#29. The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating.
John M. Ford
#30. Creating the fictional background for a game world isn't significantly different from creating a background for fiction.
John M. Ford
#31. Because I was single, there was a chance I was a homosexual. Because I went to Syracuse, wherever that was, then I was probably a Communist. Or worse, a Liberal. Because I was from Memphis, I was a subversive intent on embarrassing Ford County.
John Grisham
#33. I think the country is very settled in a lot of ways, and we saw that after the Democratic Convention. I think a lot of the bump that we enjoyed came when John Kerry selected John Edwards as his running mate.
Harold Ford Jr.
#34. When in doubt, make a western.
John Ford
#35. Well, it's an adventure story, and a Bildungsroman, of course, but there was also the intention to describe a culture that had been seen in rather narrow terms.
John M. Ford
#36. Love is dead; let lovers' eyes,
Locked in endless dreams,
The extremes of all extremes,
Ope no more, for now Love dies.
John Ford
#37. He was Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller on steroids. Sure, he was stuck up just like any rich snob was, but only to those whom he thought of as a threat to him.
Justin Bienvenue
#38. I love making pictures but I don't like talking about them.
John Ford
#39. Henry Ford was right. A prosperous economy requires that workers be able to buy the products that they produce. This is as true in a global economy as a national one.
John Sweeney
#40. The ideal, it seems to me, is to show things happening and allow the reader to decide what they mean.
John M. Ford
#41. I'm very happy that the New York Times has spoken well of my stuff; who wouldn't be? But it's not a choice I made.
John M. Ford
#42. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears that the solar system of stars.
John Steinbeck
#43. The joys of marriage are the heaven on earth, Life's paradise, great princess, the soul's quiet, Sinews of concord, earthly immortality, Eternity of pleasures.
John Ford
#44. To be quite blunt, I make pictures for money, to pay the rent.There are some great artists in the business. I am not one of them.
John Ford
#45. There are readers who want every point to be clearly and unambiguously set forth, and there are those who want to pry ideas and meanings out for themselves.
John M. Ford
#46. People tell me they laughed hard enough to wake their spouses, that they've given away numerous copies to friends, and that it's the one Trek book they'll give to people they wouldn't expect to like others.
John M. Ford
#47. They are the silent griefs which cut the heart-strings.
John Ford
#49. Honour, How much we fight with weakness to preserve thee!
John Ford
#50. When Richard M. Nixon resigned and Ford became the 38th president of the United States, the Watergate Special Prosecutor's Office, of which I was a member, was preparing for the criminal trials of Nixon's top aides - H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell.
Richard Ben-Veniste
#51. Love is the tyrant of the heart; it darkens
Reason, confounds discretion; deaf to Counsel
It runs a headlong course to desperate madness.
John Ford
#52. Tell us, pray, what devil This melancholy is, which can transform Men into monsters.
John Ford
#53. Not only does God play dice with the universe, He's using loaded dice.
John Ford
#54. The cynical part of the answer is that I expect to see a good deal more space opera, set far enough in the future as to be disconnected from contemporary issues.
John M. Ford
#55. Electronics is clearly the winner of the day.
John Ford
#56. I like, as a director and a spectator, simple, direct, frank films. Nothing disgusts me more than snobbism, mannerism, technical gratuity ... and, most of all, intellectualism.
John Ford
#57. At one point I intended to write precursor and sequel novels, about the establishment of the Web and its next evolution, but I am very unlikely to now; they would take place in a different universe.
John M. Ford
#58. Revenge proves itself to be its own executioner.
John Ford
#59. You can speak well if your tongue can deliver the message of your heart.
John Ford
#60. It is easier to get an actor to be a cowboy than to get a cowboy to be an actor.
John Ford
#61. Whilst we strive To live most free, we're caught in our own toils.
John Ford
#62. I don't think anyone wants a reader to be completely lost - certainly not to the point of giving up - but there's something to be said for a book that isn't instantly disposable, that rewards a second reading.
John M. Ford
#63. I have always credited the writer of the original material above the title: Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Bram Stoker's Dracula, or John Grisham's The Rainmaker. I felt that I didn't have the right to Francis Coppola's anything unless I had written the story and the screenplay.
Francis Ford Coppola
#64. We're not lost. We're locationally challenged
John M. Ford
#65. Give me the goddamn names, Grace," Lucas said. "C'mon. Please. Talk to me. Save yourself." "Fuck you." - FORD CAME BACK, looked at Lucas, asked, "Get a name?" "Not unless it's 'Fuck you,'" Lucas said.
John Sandford
#66. He hath shook hands with time.
John Ford
#67. Every book is three books, after all; the one the writer intended, the one the reader expected, and the one that casts its shadow when the first two meet by moonlight.
John M. Ford
#68. Musk's vision, and, of late, execution seem to combine the best of Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. With
Ashlee Vance
#69. Naturally, the reader has access only to the events I show and the way I show them, but as has been said, there's generally a good deal of ambiguity in that presentation.
John M. Ford
#70. There are people who believe in an absolutely transparent prose; with every respect for clarity of expression, I don't.
John M. Ford
#71. Sister, look ye, How, by a new creation of my tailor's I've shook off old mortality.
John Ford
#72. We're all living on borrowed time. The trick is to come up with works of sufficient interest to pay off the debt.
John M. Ford
#73. I want to be like Ford Madox Ford. I want to be talking to somebody across a fire, and I want him to join me and listen to me, and if he is fidgeting in his chair, I know I am not doing my job. I am a storyteller, and I know most people like a story.
John Le Carre
#74. Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it's not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people's eyes.
John Ford
#75. Contentment gives a crown, where fortune hath denied it.
John Ford
#76. Titles of honor add not to his worth, who is himself an honor of his titles.
John Ford
#77. I didn't show up at the ceremony to collect any of my first three Oscars. Once I went fishing, another time there was a war on, and on another occasion, I remember, I was suddenly taken drunk.
John Ford
#78. Sometimes the reader will decide something else than the author's intent; this is certainly true of attempts to empirically decipher reality.
John M. Ford
#79. Why, I hold fate Clasped in my fist, and could command the course Of time's eternal motion, hadst thou been One thought more steady than an ebbing sea.
John Ford
#80. The people who don't like it tend to dislike it intensely. That's unfortunate, but not surprising when one deliberately goes against audience expectations.
John M. Ford
#81. I would like to wish the England squad every success. I would also very much like to extend those wishes to Martin Johnson, Brian Smith, Mike Ford, John Wells, Graham Rowntree and the rest of the England 2011 World Cup management team who have been fantastic and deserve people to know that.
Jonny Wilkinson
#82. Affections injured by tyranny, or rigor of compulsion, like tempest-threatened trees, unfirmly rooted, never spring to timely growth
John Ford
#83. Askade took the battertoast, looked at it blearily. "I can't rewire it into a death ray without some extra parts," he said, and took a bite. "Hm. Tastes okay. What's the problem?
John M. Ford
#84. Melancholy Is not, as you conceive, indisposition Of body, but the mind's disease.
John Ford
#85. How did I get to Hollywood? By train.
John Ford
#86. I have known Harold Ford Jr. since before he was born, in that his father was my driver in the 1966 governor's race, and has remained a friend of mine all these years.
John Jay Hooker
#87. Alas, poor gentleman,
He look'd not like the ruins of his youth
But like the ruins of those ruins.
John Ford
#88. A bachelor May thrive by observation on a little, A single life's no burthen: but to draw In yokes is chargeable, and will require A double maintenance.
John Ford
#90. Who better than an Irishman can understand the Indians, while still being stirred by tales of the US cavalry?
John Ford
#91. If I were to write Web now, it would be a much, much darker book.
John M. Ford
#92. In my time, we served with noble and ethical leaders: Gerry Ford, Bob Michael, John Rhodes, men of impeccable honesty. We didn't have anybody locked up for a violation of ethics.
Pete McCloskey
#93. I firmly believe that as voters come to learn more and more about John Kerry and learn more and more about his message that they're going to want a President who is willing to address the fact that we didn't have a post-war plan in Iraq.
Harold Ford Jr.
#94. Revenge proves its own executioner.
John Ford
#95. Let them fear bondage who are slaves to fear; the sweetest freedom is an honest heart.
John Ford
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