Francis Ford Coppola Quotes

"I associate my motion picture career more with being unhappy and scared, or being under the gun, than with anything pleasant."

"I liked to work in a shop down in the basement and invent things and build gadgets."

"The professional world was much more unpleasant than I thought. I was always wishing I could get back that enthusiasm I had when I was doing shows at college."

"Usually, the stuff that's your best idea or work is going to be attacked the most."

"We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane."

"We were raised in an Italian-American household, although we didn't speak Italian in the house. We were very proud of being Italian, and had Italian music, ate Italian food."

"You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you'll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost."

"The essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy."

"The stuff that I got in trouble for, the casting for The Godfather or the flag scene in Patton, was the stuff that was remembered, and was considered the good work."

"I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians."

"When I was going for my graduate degree, I decided I was going to make a feature film as my thesis. That's what I was famous for-that I had my thesis film be a feature film, which was 'You're a Big Boy Now.'"

"I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing."

"A number of images put together a certain way become something quite above and beyond what any of them are individually."

"Anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos."

"Frank Capra was a prop man, I think. John Ford was a prop man. It was a little bit of a father and son thing, and you kind of worked your way up."

"George Lucas doesn't have the most physical stamina. He was so unhappy making Star Wars that he just vowed he'd never do it again."

"I always found the film world unpleasant. It's all about the schedule, and never really flew for me."

"I became quite successful very young, and it was mainly because I was so enthusiastic and I just worked so hard at it."

"I had a heartbreaking experience when I was 9. I always wanted to be a guard. The most wonderful girl in the world was a guard. When I got polio and then went back to school, they made me a guard. A teacher took away my guard button."

"I had a number of teachers who hated me. I didn't do well in school."