Donald E. Westlake Quotes

One thing I don't do anymore is read or pay attention to the critical response, which is a bummer because when I started, and when I was in school, I loved to read old film criticism.

My films always play better outside of New York, especially to critics.

Why movie and dance critics are taking 'The Company' seriously, I can't imagine. Are they impressed by Altman's reputation and naive sincerity? By the fluid semi-documentary approach?

Sometimes a movie encapsulates a period or a moment in all of our lives in such a way that it never dies.

I know people watch our movies and they'll see a lot of images - they call it gross-out - that they don't like, and I understand that. It's an important movie and one that's extremely well done, but the amount of violent imagery was not for me.

I don't believe that you can judge the worth of a movie in the atmosphere in which it comes out the first time. There's just so many reasons why some pictures don't catch on.

I think one of the things that was a huge surprise to everyone with 'Silence of the Lambs' was that that was an Oscar-winning horror movie. It struck such a nerve with audiences that it was a very particular, special experience.

A lot of people hated 'Alien 3.'

A film cannot make it into the culture without the support of critics.

There's a wealth of information on James Dean, and everybody has an opinion on him. James Dean made some kind of impression on everybody.

I'm really proud of 'Cars.' 'Cars,' when it first came out, got probably the most mediocre reviews of a Pixar film.

Out of the total of 11 movies, I got slammed.

I have my problems with 'Singles'. To me, 'Singles' is the least successful of the movies I've been lucky enough to make.

It doesn't really matter if this movie's a success or not, because it's already out there.

Hey, I didn't make a big deal out of Hotel California. The 18 million people that bought it did.

And the insidious thing is that people will either see a movie because it did well last weekend or won't see it because it didn't do well.

I never feel so utterly fraudulent as when I review a movie whose charms impress all in the world and I simply do not get it. The other variant is that I love something the world disdains. This has had severe career consequences: I am still famous - or notorious - in certain quarters where I am recalled as the man who liked 'Hudson Hawk.'

Still, as much as I wish Ballistic Kiss could be a better film, the recognition it gained from critics and at festivals speaks for itself.

I don't think 'Cocktail' was a perfect critical success, but it touched a vein in our culture.

When I brought 'El Topo' to New York, no one understood the picture. But John Lennon understood. John and Yoko Ono, they presented 'El Topo' in the United States; they introduced it.

I don't think the audience always listens to the critics. That's been proven time and time again.

Anytime you put a movie out it's subject to such scrutiny and such criticism.

When I die, I want to be the only person in the world not to have seen 'The Sound Of Music.'

Like I said about Freaked, people tend to find these films, and I think that in the end the cool thing about a movie is that it can be sort of burnt temporarily, but then it's burnt into the fabric of your culture.

Elvis is great and so is anybody who lasts like he does.