Mike Nichols Quotes

There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do. It’s like falling in love.

I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That’s the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.

Any good movie is filled with secrets.

There's nothing in the American dream about character. It's a serious flaw.

A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.

The unconscious is our best collaborator.

Being with an insanely jealous person is like being in the room with a dead mammoth.

I was just trying to make a nice little movie... It wasn't until I saw it all put together that I realized this was something remarkable.

I love the editing process of making movies. I just wish that life had one.

I have never understood people dividing things into dramas and comedies.

I came to love silence, because it's so rare, and it's now my favorite aural condition.

That seems to me the greatest American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.

The only safe thing in filmmaking is to take a chance.

It's the hardest thing on earth to like yourself, and then when you do, it's a catastrophe. I mean, the people I know who like themselves - I don't want to see them!

Nerves provide me with energy... It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that's when I get worried.

Jewish introspection and Jewish humor is a way of surviving . . . if you're not handsome and you're not athletic and you're not rich, there's still one last hope with girls, which is being funny.

Yes. The whole point about laughter is it's like mercury: you can't catch it, you can't catch what motivates it - that's why it's funny.

It's not a filmmaker's job to explain his technique but to tell his story the best way he can.

I asked a shrink: 'Everything is so great. Why am I still so angry?' He said, 'Anger doesn't go away.' I always thought it was kind of a good engine.

I am drawn to the mystery of marriage. You can never know what the contract is between two people, and that is a very strong subject. I think it may be my subject.

I think the main thing about comedy and humor is that it's impossible and always was impossible to define.

Nerves provide me with energy. ... It's when I don't have them when I feel at ease that I get worried.

Nerves provide me with energy.... It's when I don't have them when I feel at ease that I get worried.

I spend my money...I don't know on what.