John Cassavetes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

People don't know what they are doing most of the time. They don't know what they want. It's only in 'the movies' that they know what their problems are and have game plans to deal with them.

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

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

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

I won't call my work entertainment. It's exploring. It's asking questions of people, constantly. 'How much do you feel? How much do you know? Are you aware of this? Can you cope with this?' A good movie will ask you questions you don't already know the answers to. Why would I want to make a film about something I already understand?