It [film-making] really just has to do with my own ghosts and phantoms. And I have to say, in the end, it's just my way of seeing things.

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.

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

A diary with no drawings of me in it? Where are the torrid fantasies? The romance covers?

When you cross that chasm so that what you believe to be true merges into what is actually true, you have earned the right to inner peace.

The difficulties of conducting espionage against the Soviet Union in the Soviet Union were such that historically the Agency had backed away from the task.

You need emotional content.

The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.

I love mysteries, and I read them every night before I go to bed.

I've taken up the Bible again, somewhat in the spirit of W.C. Fields - looking for loopholes.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.

Being a mother is the hardest job on earth. Women everywhere must declare it so.

We all want to do the will of God, and we know that there is nothing nearer to His heart than the evangelization of the world.