Francis Ford Coppola Quotes

I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.

When I was about 9, I had polio, and people were very frightened for their children, so you tended to be isolated. I was paralyzed for a while, so I watched television.

An essential element of any art is risk. If you don't take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn't been seen before?

I used to love going into local hardware stores, to look at little things they made locally. Nowadays it's harder, though you can still do it in Vietnam.

I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.

There's nothing creative about living within your means.

Anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos.

We were raised in an Italian-American household, although we didn't speak Italian in the house. We were very proud of being Italian, and had Italian music, ate Italian food.

You don't have to specialize - do everything that you love and then, at some time, the future will come together for you in some form.

I liked to work in a shop down in the basement and invent things and build gadgets.

If the movie works, nobody notices the mistakes... If the movie doesn't work, the only thing people notice are mistakes.

You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you'll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost.

Usually, the stuff that's your best idea or work is going to be attacked the most.

My talent is that I just try and try and try and try again and little by little it comes to something.

I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing.

It was the man's dream, and his inspiring attempt to make them come true that remain important.

Anyone who's made film and knows about the cinema has a lifelong love affair with the experience. You never stop learning about film.

Although knowledge of structure is helpful, real creativity comes from leaps of faith in which you jump to something illogical. But those leaps form the memorable moments in movies and plays.

Drinking wine is just a part of life, like eating food.

One thing that I'm sure of is the real pleasure of life - it's not being known, it's not having your own jet plane, it's not having a mansion the pleasure is to learn something

It takes no imagination to live within your means.

Movies are the art form most like man's imagination.

I had been a kid that moved so much, I didn’t have a lot of friends. Theater really represented that kind of camaraderie.

I associate my motion picture career more with being unhappy and scared, or being under the gun, than with anything pleasant.

A director is the ringmaster of a circus that's inventing itself.

In a sense, I think a movie is really a little like a question and when you make it, that's when you get the answer.

Wine is so much more than a beverage. It's a romance, a story, a drama-all of those things that are basically putting on a show.

A number of images put together a certain way become something quite above and beyond what any of them are individually.

Listen, if there's one sure-fire rule that I have learned in this business, it's that I don't know anything about human nature.

The professional world was much more unpleasant than I thought. I was always wishing I could get back that enthusiasm I had when I was doing shows at college.

The whole reason one wants to do lower budget films is because the lower the budget, the bigger the ideas, the bigger the themes, the more interesting the art.

You ought to love what you're doing because, especially in a movie, over time you really will start to hate it.

I have more of a vivid imagination than I have talent. I cook up ideas. It's just a characteristic.

The essence of cinema is editing.

Sound is your friend because sound is much cheaper than picture, but it has equal effect on the audience - in some ways, perhaps more effect because it does it in a very indirect way.

Art depends on luck and talent.

I became quite successful very young, and it was mainly because I was so enthusiastic and I just worked so hard at it.

The essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy.

Some critics are stimulating in that they make you realise how you could do better, and those are valued.

They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family.

I never went to a psychologist or psychiatrist in my life. Never. You know, Italians are a little prejudiced against that kind of thing.

Work on nothing less than epic scale

The photographer and the director are where reality and fantasy meet.

Time is the lens through which dreams are captured.

Whom God wishes to destroy, He first makes successful in show business.

When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.

Death is what makes life an event.

The most adventurous thing I've done is learn how to fly a helicopter in the Philippines. One night we landed on a beach and slept on it.

I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In 'The Godfather' it was succession. In 'The Conversation' it was privacy. In 'Apocalypse' it was morality.

George Lucas doesn't have the most physical stamina. He was so unhappy making Star Wars that he just vowed he'd never do it again.