Joseph L. Mankiewicz Quotations

I'm a schoolteacher. That's even worse than being an intellectual. Schoolteachers are not only comic, they're often cold and hungry in this richest land on earth.

The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.

There is no such thing as realistic dialogue. If you [simply recorded] the real conversation of any people and played it back from the stage, it would be impossible to listen to. It would be redundant . . . . The good dialogue writer is the one who can give you the impression of real speech.

Funny business, a woman's career: the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. It's one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we've had or wanted.

So many people know me. I wish I did. I wish someone would tell me about me.

Every screenwriter worthy of the name has already directed his film when he has written his script.

Please don't look at me as if you had a source of income other than your salary.

All playwrights should be dead for three hundred years.

In my last two years in high school, my face was pocked with pimples, I stammered when I spoke; if I made a mistake, I blushed furiously, and when nervous, as I was in the company of girls, I perspired freely.

And Kate Hepburn-God, she's beautiful, God, she plays golf well, God, she can get anyone in the world on the phone, God, she knows what to do all the time, God, she wears clothes well.

[Writers are] the highest paid secretaries in the world.

I'm not biting my fingernails. I'm biting my knuckles. I finished the fingernails months ago.

There's nothing as real as money.

I got a job at Metro and went in to see Louis Mayer, who told me he wanted me to be a producer. I said I wanted to write and direct. He said, No, you have to produce first, you have to crawl before you can walk. Which is as good a definition of producing as I ever heard.

I am a critic - as essential to the theatre as ants to a picnic.

I've been in on the beginning, the rise, peak, collapse and end of the talking picture.