Mike Nichols Quotes

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Mike Nichols

Profession : Director

Birth : November 6, 1931

Very often when a story really holds us, it gets pushed away because it's too close for comfort.

Mike Nichols

It's the hardest thing on earth to like yourself, and then when you do, it's a catastrophe. I mean, the people I know who like themselves - I don't want to see them!

Mike Nichols

I still think that luck is what a lot of the good things come from. It's simply the luck of where you are, when.

Mike Nichols

Here's the most mysterious thing to me. I look back at those first plays I did and the first movies I did, and I only have one question, which is, 'What was I so confident about? Where did I get that?

Mike Nichols

I'm anything but confident.

Mike Nichols

Directing is mystifying. It's a long, long, skid on an icy road, and you do the best you can trying to stay on the road... If you're still here when you come out of the spin, it's a relief. But you've got to have the terror if you're going to do anything worthwhile.

Mike Nichols

Oh my God, if I know anything, I know I'm gonna die! I never forget that. I know I'll be forgotten in a minute, and that's just fine with me.

Mike Nichols

I am drawn to the mystery of marriage. You can never know what the contract is between two people, and that is a very strong subject. I think it may be my subject.

Mike Nichols

As a director, my job is, and always has been, divided into a number of things: dealing with the crew, the money and the studio, and the marketing and publicity. These are all different jobs that have to be learned and done as well as possible. The celebrity part rarely touches a director.

Mike Nichols

My father wasn't too crazy about me. I loved him anyway. One of the things I regretted for a long time was that he died before he could see that he would be proud of me. I was actually more what he wished for than he thought.

Mike Nichols

Any good movie is filled with secrets.

Mike Nichols

Stand-up comedy is a very hard thing on the spirit. There are people who transcend it, like Jack Benny and Steve Martin, but in its essence, it's soul-destroying. It tends to turn people into control freaks.

Mike Nichols

Things come in waves, and I'm always more interested in places like, for instance, Chicago, where people don't follow fashion. They're not galloping past your window on the way to the latest anything. They're living their lives. You do a play, they come and see it and say, 'That's nice', and then they go home.

Mike Nichols

You can always tell gifted and highly intelligent people as they always turn to the past. Any young person who knows anything that happened before 1980, or 1990, or 2000 for that matter, is immediately someone who is intelligent, probably creative, maybe a writer. Nobody who is drawn to the past and learning about the past is not gifted.

Mike Nichols

I'm an enormous fan of 'The West Wing.' It was one of the very few shows I would watch every week.

Mike Nichols

I don't know that a political climate - as long as it's still a free country - makes much difference in the film world.

Mike Nichols

The reason that most British actors are better than most American actors in the end is that they don't make any money. At the very end of their lives, they get into a space movie and they make a lot of money, but until that happens, basically, they don't have bank accounts. They live from day to day.

Mike Nichols

A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.

Mike Nichols

American society to me and my brother was thrilling because, first of all, the food made noise. We were so excited about Rice Krispies and Coca-Cola. We had only silent food in our country, and we loved listening to our lunch and breakfast.

Mike Nichols

I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That's the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.

Mike Nichols