Top 20 Preston Sturges Quotes

Our gymnasium was remarkable and had more stuff in it than one could dream up in a nightmare. Furthermore, every boy had to use every piece of it during gymnasium class.

I did not think that a good movie was the equivalent of a good stage play, any more than I thought an automobile ride was as exhilarating as a drive behind a spirited horse, nor a trip by steam as soul-satisfying as a voyage by sail.

For a southern belle, my grandmother was remarkably modern. She threw my grandfather out, for one thing – some kind of argument about bourbon whiskey – shortly after the birth of their third child, and then went back to school to get herself a teaching certificate.

According to my mother, positively no one, least of all herself, had even the faintest suspicion that she was heavy with child at the time of my birth.

Theater in which you eat is the oldest form of theater.

I don’t believe environment has the slightest bit to do with anything – I only believe in ancestral influence. It would have made no difference whether I’d been brought up in a reform school, or on the island of Lesbos.

Despite my express wish, I was not left in Chicago, but taken to Paris to live, and I did not see my father for many years. But we never stopped loving each other, and in 1940 he died in my arms in Hollywood, where he had come to be near me at the end.

How many years and how many pictures does it take to win the confidence of Paramount? How many years before my fellow workers say, ‘I know he is doing his best?’

The more nearly the film cutter approaches the natural law of interest, the more invisible will be his cutting. If the camera moves from one person to another at the exact moment that you in the legitimate theatre would have turned your head, you will not be conscious of a cut.

I go through life accumulating possessions… I’ve always done it… and then, every once in a while, a sort of tidal wave comes along and washes them all away.

Paris Singer had vastly more to do with shaping my character than Mother had; although Mother made innumerable sacrifices for me, and Paris Singer made none. I wanted to be like him.

The camera must point at the exact spot the audience wishes to look at any given moment. To find that spot is absurdly easy: you only have to remember where you were looking at the time the scene was made.

I never write down to my audiences. I respect honest sentiment and honest pratfalls.

The hook is a word or an idea spoken by one character which gives the next character something to hook onto when he responds or, like a trapeze artist, gives him something to swing from on his way to another point of view.

You can’t go around the theatres handing out cards saying, ‘It isn’t my fault’. You go onto the next one.

I am quite sure that a little man who braves ridicule to improve the lot of his fellow men, and is thanked by their jibes, is an interesting character.

Of the Sturges family, much more is known than is available about poor Irish immigrants and obscure Scottish-English settlers around Rochester.

I am, of course, directly descended from Brian Boru, the last king of Ireland, a fact certified by my mother and therefore beyond dispute. But as everybody else with a drop of Irish blood in his carcass is also a guaranteed descendant of the old billy goat, I am not overly arrogant because of this royal strain.

I have never done anything but my very best work for anyone, and to do this and retain my first fine enthusiasm over a period of thirty years has required a rather special set of working conditions.

I have always wondered why the movie industry was so firmly persuaded that the original author could be of no possible help in the case of a remake or any other change in a work.