Top 25 John Cassavetes Quotes

I don’t care about being on top, about being No. 1. I just make movies for a few suckers in the audience, anyway.

You can defeat fear through humor, through pain, through honesty, bravery, intuition, and through love in the truest sense.

By the age of 50, I would like to know that I’m not dead – that there’s some continuity to my life.

I’m a great believer in spontaneity because I think planning is the most destructive thing in the world.

People have said that my films are very difficult to watch, that they’re experiences you are put through rather than ones you enjoy, and it’s true.

You can fail in films because you don’t have the talent, or you have too much humility, or you lack ferociousness. I’m a gangster. If I want something, I’ll grab it.

I would put my pictures up against anybody’s in this world. Certainly in my own day I bow to no one. I don’t think there’s another director in the world who works harder to make better films than I do.

There is no reason why a serious film, one about life, can’t be enjoyable, maybe even fun. Emotions can be very entertaining, you know. I try to use them generously in my films.

You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all.

We only have two hours to change people’s lives.

The idea of love as a mysterious, undiscovered world has come to have no place in our innermost imagination.

I think I’m probably one of the worst directors around, but I do have an interest in my fellow man.

I think people are very stiff. Money makes people stiff, and we want it, and we have to pay the penalty. I never agreed with stiffness. I think people have an understanding of what their life is. I define success by being a realist and not humiliating people. I’m a revolutionary – but not in the political sense.

As an artist, I feel that we must try many things – but above all we must dare to fail.

My mother and father were never frightened of anything. They always felt that they should go through life happily and without fear, and they did that. And it was a great boon to my brother and myself.

The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things – but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all.

No matter how old you get, if you can keep the desire to be creative, you’re keeping the man-child alive.

You know as a director what you want, but the film is smarter than you, the film says no, the film says there’s something more here.

I have a one-track mind. That’s all that I’m interested in – love. And the lack of it. When it stops.

I won’t make shorthand films, because I don’t want to manipulate audiences into assuming quick, manufactured truths.

We have problems, terrible problems, but our problems are human problems.

My parents allowed their two sons to be individuals. My family was a wild and wonderful place, with lots of friends and neighbors visiting and talking loud and eating loud and nobody telling the children to be quiet or putting them down.

The camera is the slave to the actor.

‘Faces’ became more than a film. It became a way of life, a film against the authorities and the powers that prevent people from expressing themselves the way they want to, something that can’t be done in America, that can’t be done without money.

Commercial movies have no feeling, no sensitivity. Most people tell me people won’t understand films with feeling. But everyone can feel.