Robert Altman Quotes

Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.

I never knew what I wanted, except that it was something I hadn't seen before.

[The Player is] not a truthful indictment of Hollywood. It's much uglier than I portrayed it, but nobody would've been interested if I'd shown just how sadistic, cruel and self-orientated it is.

Your own ego is the only trap that I think you can fall into.

I love fishing. You put that line in the water and you don't know what's on the other end. Your imagination is under there.

Chance is another name that we give to our mistakes. And all of the best things in my films are mistakes.

I don't think screenplay writing is the same as writing - I mean, I think it's blueprinting.

If you have a child who is seven feet tall, you don't cut off his head or his legs. You buy him a bigger bed and hope he plays basketball.

All of my films deal with the same thing: striving, socially and culturally, to stay alive.

What is an ending? There's no such thing. Death is the only ending.

I have never made a movie that's attracted a 14-year-old boy.

It's all just one film to me. Just different chapters.

If George W. Bush is elected president, I'm leaving for France.

Men make clothes for the women they'd like to be with or in most cases the women they'd like to be.

Most of my films I call arena films. I deal with a confined area -- an arena -- and I try to cover every aspect of it.

Jazz has endured because it doesn't have a beginning or an ending. It's a moment.

That wasn't an ending. It was just a stopping point.

I'll give you the same advice I give my children: Never take advice from anybody.

Wisdom and love have nothing to do with each other. Wisdom is staying alive, survival. You're wise if you don't stick your finger in the light plug. Love - you'll stick your finger in anything.

I don't know what "Altmanesque" means, though I suppose I'm flattered by it.

What is a cult? It just means not enough people to make a minority.

Every ad for every film is exactly the same.

The Oscar for the films, it'd be nice. But I don't make those kind of films, and I don't think that will ever happen.

You will never see'Altman's Great Film of the Seventies: The Director's Cut' because you have never seen a film of mine that wasn't the director's cut. I have never permitted it.

[M*A*S*H] didn't get released by FOX, it escaped.

We make too much of the good and too much of the bad.

Maybe there's a chance to get back to grown-up films. Anything that uses humor and dramatic values to deal with human emotions and gets down to what people are to people.

Why should I keep doing things that I've done before?

I've had it-the agencies, the winking, the networks, the ratings. Anyone who thinks TV is an art medium is crazy-it's an advertising medium.

The minute you have more than one voice, you have more possibilities opening up. You have all the molecules in all of those bodies and their make up interacting.

Retirement? You're talking about death, right?

I like audiences to crane their necks.

What's a cult? It just means not enough people to make a minority.

To play it safe is not to play.