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. None of the standard high school science courses made much of an impression on me, but I did enjoy the Advanced Placement Chemistry course I took in my senior year. This course had only eleven students and was taught by a rarity for our school, an exchange teacher from England, Mr. Leslie Sturges.

Martin Chalfie

#3. We pore through libraries, dissecting the classics Henry Sturges- vampire

Seth Grahame-Smith

#4. Don't be alarmed, Mr. Sturges. Some of my closest friends are dead.

Seth Grahame-Smith

#5. 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

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

Matthew Modine

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

Preston Sturges

#8. Working with Sturges was like working with a guy who wanted to have a party all the time. He was very serious about his work, but in between shots, he was fun and we would play games.

Eddie Bracken

#9. 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

#10. You people with your quests annoy the pants off me.

Matthew Sturges

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

Preston Sturges

#12. As soon as you forbid something, you make it extraordinarily appealing. You also bring shame in as a phenomenon.

Jock Sturges

#13. 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

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

Preston Sturges

#15. 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

#16. Virtually always I get my best pictures when everybody thinks the shoot's done.

Jock Sturges

#17. It's no small irony that the government inevitably and invariably ends up promoting precisely that which they would most like to repress.

Jock Sturges

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. A story should have a point, but a life doesn't need one. It just needs to be lived.

Matthew Sturges

#21. Every child is going to grow up. You can see it happen in the books: They get older and older and belong to themselves to a greater and greater extent.

Jock Sturges

#22. They were without clothes before I got there, and they were without clothes when I left.

Jock Sturges

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

Preston Sturges

#24. I'm an artist that's attracted to a specific way of seeing and a way of being.

Jock Sturges

#25. 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

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

Preston Sturges

#27. I've had to relearn how I work with people so that if and when I do avoid different things I don't send any messages in doing so.

Jock Sturges

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

Preston Sturges

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. What pedophiles and people who have sexual desires on children lose sight of to a terrible, terrible degree - a devastating degree - is that their victims are real people who will suffer forever whatever abuses are perpetrated on them.

Jock Sturges

#32. 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

#33. That's my ambition: that you look at the pictures and realize what complex, fascinating, interesting people every single one of my subjects is.

Jock Sturges

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

Preston Sturges

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

Preston Sturges

#36. 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

#37. In fact, I don't believe I'm guilty of any crimes, but I've always been drawn to and fascinated by physical, sexual and psychological change, and there's an erotic aspect to that.

Jock Sturges

#38. When I started doing my work years ago, I had doubts as to whether the informed-consent question was answerable.

Jock Sturges

#39. 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

#40. That dichotomy between the public consumption of the work and my intent and practice in making it is an uneasy one for me, on occasion.

Jock Sturges

#41. There isn't a person alive who doesn't like being caressed.

Jock Sturges

#42. If it gets to the Supreme Court, I'll have the directors of every museum in the country as expert testimony that my work is legitimate art.

Jock Sturges

#43. 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

#44. It's really, really hard to make it as a fine-art photographer exclusively.

Jock Sturges

#45. All my life I've taken photographs of people who are completely at peace being what they were in the situations I photographed them in.

Jock Sturges

#46. 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

#47. What I'm good at is making art.

Jock Sturges

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

Preston Sturges

#49. But empirically I've come to understand that my photographs really don't do any harm.

Jock Sturges

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. I should have had the pickle.

Preston Sturges

#54. 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

#55. Any artist that's involved in their work is inevitably going to have a focus in what they do.

Jock Sturges

#56. Before, I'd photograph anything. I didn't think there was anything more or less obscene about any part of the body.

Jock Sturges

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. I know the families that I photograph extremely well, and I've known them for a very long time.

Jock Sturges

#60. I became good at defending myself, but as far as I was concerned, that was a transient skill.

Jock Sturges

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

Preston Sturges

#62. What do you expect me to do i am a pirate not a ninja!" - Annie, The House of Mystery

Matthew Sturges

#63. My hope is that the work is in some way counter-pinup. A pinup asks you to suspend interest in who the person is and occupy yourself entirely with looking at the body and fantasizing about what you could do with that body, completely ignoring how the person might feel about it.

Jock Sturges

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

Preston Sturges

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. I found myself serving a sentence of public denial from the very second the raid on my apartment happened.

Jock Sturges

#69. 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

#70. There are photographs that I don't take now that I previously would have taken without any thought at all as to any misinterpretations.

Jock Sturges

#71. I didn't think there was anything more or less obscene about any part of the body. Now, I recognize that there are certain postures and angles that make people see red, which are evidence of original sin or something, and I avoid that.

Jock Sturges

#72. 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

#73. Physical beauty is such a strange thing.

Jock Sturges

#74. The world is shrinking as we see more and more of it in the media, and the more we see of the world, the smaller we are, the more aware we are of how insignificant any one of us is.

Jock Sturges

#75. The images I like best are parts of series that I've started, in some cases, with the pregnancies of the mothers of the children in question, and I continue that series right on through the birth of children to the child that resulted from that first pregnancy.

Jock Sturges

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. Different members of different cultures will think that some things are beautiful.

Jock Sturges

#80. 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

#81. Now, I recognize that there are certain postures and angles that make people see red, which are evidence of original sin or something, and I avoid that. I don't shoot that any more.

Jock Sturges

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. Some of the people that I photographed as sticks became much more voluptuous, much rounder, in some cases dramatically so, and I think they're even more beautiful.

Jock Sturges

#85. We live in an age where anonymity is growing in magnitude like a bomb going off.

Jock Sturges

#86. I am fascinated by the human body and all its evolutions.

Jock Sturges

#87. 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

#88. I just yesterday returned from a trip where I photographed a woman with two children whom I photographed first when she was the age of the older of the two children.

Jock Sturges

#89. I'd rather get back to making art than talk about it.

Jock Sturges

#90. I don't photograph any two people who are remotely the same.

Jock Sturges

#91. I'm guilty of extraordinary naivete, I suppose. But it's a naivete that I really don't want to abandon, not even now.

Jock Sturges

#92. There's no particular evidence that any of the lower mammals or any of the other animals have any interest in aesthetics at all. But Homo sapiens does, always has and always will.

Jock Sturges

#93. 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

#94. But the truth is that Homo sapiens is a sensual species. I think all species are, to one degree or another.

Jock Sturges

#95. 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

#96. A virulent, aggressive minority has decided that Americans don't know themselves what it is they should see, and need to be protected by people who are wiser than they are, even if they are only a tiny sliver of the population.

Jock Sturges

#97. I'm the last person who has any desire to instruct anybody in shame. That's no errand for me.

Jock Sturges

#98. I use an 8 x 10 view camera. All other cameras are just toys.

Jock Sturges

#99. 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

#100. The truth is that from birth on we are, to one extent or another, a fairly sensual species.

Jock Sturges