I can't see America any other way than with a European's eyes. It fascinates me and terrifies me at the same time.

When I was young, I believed in three things: Marxism, the redemptive power of cinema, and dynamite. Now I just believe in dynamite.

In my childhood, America was like a religion. Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life - in jeeps - and upset all my dreams.

My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice-versa.

The important thing is to make a different world, to make a world that is not now. A real world, a genuine world, but one that allows myth to live. The myth is everything.

When you manage to express something with a look and the music instead of saying it with words or having the character speak, I think it's a more complete work.

Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price. That is why the bounty killers appeared.

Probably the greatest writer of westerns himself was Homer. His character were never all good or all bad. They're half and half, these characters, as all human beings are.

You see in Once Upon a Time in the West the whole film moves around her [Claudia Cardinale]. If you take her out, there's no more film. She's the central motor of the entire happening.

There are directors, and there are authors. I think I am more of an author than a director.

It's very difficult to be original.

The only French word I know is oui, which means “yes, ” and only recently did I learn it’s spelled o-​u-​i and not w-​e-​e.

Truth is hard, propaganda is cheap.

Man kept control over the machines he created, I wish God would have done the same with the man he created.

Thirty seconds of pure awareness is a long time, especially after a lifetime of escaping yourself at all costs.

I have the worst ear for criticism, even when I have created a stage set I like, I always hear the woman in the back of the dress circle, who says she doesn't like blue.

Don't automatically obey Presidential directives if you disagree or if you suspect he hasn't considered key aspects of the issue.

That which chiefly causes the failure of a dinner-party, is the running short--not of meat, nor yet of drink, but of conversation.

My understanding of women goes only as far as the pleasures.

It's more instinctive to want revenge, but we are also capable of immense amounts of forgiveness and love and a compassion that extends even to those who have brutalized us.

Struggling with the world and having the problem of you vs. the world is a really big problem. You're going to lose because the world is so much bigger than you, and longer lasting.