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.

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.

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.

It's very difficult to be original.

My mom and dad gave their kids the greatest gift of all - the gift of unconditional love. They cared deeply about who we would be, and much less about what we would do.

I have learned the art of filling in your lines with your visuals and your movies and your imagination

They [African-American community] have been abused and used in order to get votes by Democrat politicians, because that's what it is. They've controlled these communities for up to 100 years.

The stakes are nary a problem to me, as I do not abide by Sir Isaac's law!

Meaning does not interest me and has almost nothing to do with my decisions or judgments.

I love you in my dreams, but not in real life.

I thought I was your destination. Looks like I was just another stop on the line.

The beauty of self realization lies in secretly working out within you everything that is virtuous, that is beautiful, that is joyful.

Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all .... as long as you tell the truth.

To simply dismiss the concept of God as being unscientific is to violate the very objectivity of science itself.