Mike Nichols Quotes

Author Image

Mike Nichols

Profession : Director

Birth : November 6, 1931

I used to say that winning the Oscar means being back at the Beverly Hills Hotel at 1 A.M. feeling empty. It's the industry voting. It doesn't come from God. It doesn't change your life, really.

Mike Nichols

Nerves provide me with energy... It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that's when I get worried.

Mike Nichols

Plays, especially great plays, yield their secrets over a long period of time. You can't read it three times and say, 'OK, I got it. I know what's happening.'

Mike Nichols

The producers want us to sell, sell, sell. That's my little joke. That's what we do by day; by night, we're artists.

Mike Nichols

It took me forever, learning improvisation, because I had studied with Lee Strasberg - I dropped out of Chicago and went to his classes in New York for a couple of years, once or twice a week. What I didn't realize was I was learning directing because he wasn't all that good about acting, not for me.

Mike Nichols

I believed early and still believe that everybody who can act can do it already, just they don't know how and don't want to talk about it.

Mike Nichols

I never understand when people say, 'Do you do comedy or tragedy?' I don't think they're very much different. They both have to be true, and there isn't a great play in the world that doesn't have funny parts to it - as 'Salesman' does, as 'King Lear' does. The whole idea is to reflect life in some way, which means surely you have to have both.

Mike Nichols

You want to make money, remake 'Cinderella.' You want to move people, remake the Hippolytus and Phaedra myth.

Mike Nichols

The degree to which you're peculiar and different is the degree to which you must learn to hear people thinking. Just in self-defense you have to learn, where is their kindness? Where is their danger? Where is their generosity?

Mike Nichols

In a weird way, when I was looking back, I didn't know I was going to be a director until I was.

Mike Nichols

If you lose a parent, it never goes away. As a kid, I dreamed about my father coming back for 15 or 20 years. I still do sometimes.

Mike Nichols

I loved all movies, literally. I certainly loved 'Shane' and 'Roxie Hart.' Later on, when I was less of a kid, I loved 'L'Avventura' and 'Persona' and all Fellini movies and like everybody else I loved John Ford. Then and now, I loved Preston Sturges, maybe above anyone.

Mike Nichols

Technically, maybe I learned most of all from George Stevens, and among his movies I learned the most from 'A Place in the Sun.' It's a lesson in moviemaking.

Mike Nichols

I had a high school girlfriend whose mother gave us theater tickets, so I saw the second night performance of 'A Streetcar Named Desire.' My girl and I could not get up during intermission, we were so stunned. To this day it's the only thing I've seen on stage that's 100 percent real and 100 percent poetic simultaneously.

Mike Nichols

Most great plays of the past lose their grip on immediacy; on application to our lives right now.

Mike Nichols

Whether something is a success or not has never had much to do with what you do next.

Mike Nichols

There's nothing in the American dream about character. It's a serious flaw.

Mike Nichols

There are absolutely almost perfect people who experience no guilt; they don't know what it is. They simply do what they need to do - or want to do - next. They see nothing wrong with it. They feel no guilt. They express no guilt. And it's not even certain what harm they do.

Mike Nichols

A play, after all, is a mystery. There's no narration. And as soon as there's no narration, it's open to interpretation. It must be interpreted. You don't have a choice... Each play can become many things.

Mike Nichols

People, by and large, would rather be talking than listening.

Mike Nichols