Mike Nichols Quotes

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Mike Nichols

Profession : Director

Birth : November 6, 1931

It's not a film-maker's job to explain his technique, but to tell his story the best way he can.

Mike Nichols

A great thing is happening on cable TV. You see characters change in stories over years, like in Tolstoy. That's a whole, thrilling new form that I really enjoy. They are Tolstoy-an in their endless character development and narrative changes... a show like 'Breaking Bad' is astonishing.

Mike Nichols

It's very weird about movies: you never know which ones are going to stay alive and which one are going to be meaningless. When you're there, you couldn't possibly predict it. Some things slowly die, and others slowly stay a while.

Mike Nichols

'Catch-22' was a nightmare to make, and everybody was unhappy except me.

Mike Nichols

For a director, a musical is a special kind of hell.

Mike Nichols

Comedy is brutal. It's powerful, though.

Mike Nichols

Fear of comedy is all so much about who you do it with.

Mike Nichols

It's very, very corrupting to the spirit, doing comedy. And you have to be almost a saint, like Jack Benny was, like Steve Martin is, to avoid the corrupting of it, because there's very little work where the actual work and the reward are simultaneous, and comedy is that.

Mike Nichols

The reason you do this stuff - comedy, plays, movies - is to be seized by something, to disappear in the service of an idea.

Mike Nichols

If you want to be a legend, God help you, it's so easy. You just do one thing. You can be the master of suspense, say. But if you want to be as invisible as is practical, then it's fun to do a lot of different things.

Mike Nichols

I came to love silence, because it's so rare, and it's now my favorite aural condition.

Mike Nichols

You could say that it's in talking movies that inner life begins to appear. You can see things happen to the faces of people that were neither planned nor rehearsed.

Mike Nichols

The greatest thrill is that moment when a thousand people are sitting in the dark, looking at the same scene, and they are all apprehending something that has not been spoken. That's the thrill of it, the miracle - that's what holds us to movies forever. It's what we wish we could do in real life.

Mike Nichols

As a little kid in a sometimes hard place, I went to the movies as often as I could. Movies - making them, seeing them - is not something that could ever lose its pleasure for me. That puts them on a short list of things that eternally give me joy - love, family, food, movies.

Mike Nichols

Clay Aiken is amazing beyond that glorious voice. Turns out he is an excellent comic actor and a master of character.

Mike Nichols

I think a director can make a play happen before your eyes so that you are part of it and it is part of you. If you can get it right, there's no mystery. It's not about mystery. It's not even mysterious. It's about our lives.

Mike Nichols

All movies are pure process. A commercial movie isn't less process than an art movie. You can't make your decisions about a film on the basis of, 'Is it important enough? Is it serious enough?' It's either alive or it's not for me. If it's alive, I want to do it.

Mike Nichols

The things that you saw earlier in your life generally have more power than the things you saw last week.

Mike Nichols

I don't expect anything from reviews. Sometimes I am bemused by them.

Mike Nichols

When we talk about reviews, what we are really talking about is just a market report - it's like reading about the new Lexus. You have to know what the guy writing the review cares about to understand his take. Does he like sports cars, or does he like Bentleys?

Mike Nichols