"Twenty-one years between first and second films is longer than any director should have to wait. The case of Polonsky is one of the most dismal hangovers from the McCarthy period."

“First of all, directing is an idea that you have of a total flow of images that are going on, which are incidentally actors, words, and objects in space. It's an idea you have of yourself, like the idea you have of your own personality which finds its best representation in the world in terms of specific flows of imaginary images. That's what directing is.”

“Polonsky, along with Chaplin and Losey, remains one of the great casualties of the anti-Communist hysteria of the fifties.”

“Indians don't last in prison. They weren't born for it like the whites.”

“It was a great pleasure to make a movie again. Nothing is better; perhaps revolution, but there you have to succeed and be right, dangers which never attach themselves to making movies, and dreaming.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know I got rid of the headache. Now I got cancer.”

“What do you mean "gangsters"? It's business.”