Preston Sturges Quotes

When the last dime is gone, I'll sit on the curb outside with a pencil and a ten cent notebook and start the whole thing over again.

That's one of the tragedies of this life - that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous.

The most incredible thing about my career is that I had one.

You know, Maude . . . somebody meeting you for the first time -- not knowing you were cracked -- might get the wrong impression of you.

Film is the greatest educational medium the world has ever known.

When the last dime is gone, I'll sit on the curb with a pencil and a ten-cent notebook, and start the whole thing all over again." – Preston Sturges

THE POLITICIAN If it wasn't for graft, you'd get a very low type of people in politics. Men without ambition. Jellyfish! CATHERINE Especially since you can't rob the people anyway. THE POLITICIAN Sure...How was that? CATHERINE What you rob, you spend. And what you spend goes back to the people. So where's the robbery? I read that in one of my father's books. THE POLITICIAN That book should be in every home!

We are all like bit players in a Preston Sturges movie, ready to testify in front of a small-town jury in terms whose relevance would escape anyone but ourselves.

This is the story of two men who met in a banana republic. One of them never did anything dishonest in his life except for one crazy minute. The other never did anything honest in his life except for one crazy minute.

JEAN I need him like the axe needs the turkey. HARRINGTON Don't be vulgar, Jean. Let us be crooked, but never common.

GERRY I would step on your face! HACKENSACKER That's quite all right, I rather enjoyed it. GERRY Twice! HACKENSACKER You made quite an impression.

JEAN Boy, would I like to see you give some old harpie the three in one! COLONEL Don't be vulgar, Jane. Let us be crooked, but never common.

As Titanic began production, there was an immediate chemistry between Barbara and myself—a lot of looks across the room. At this point Barbara Stanwyck was a legendary actress, universally respected for her level of craft and integrity. She also had the most valuable thing a performer can have: good taste. Besides a long list of successful bread-and-butter pictures, Barbara had made genuine classics for great directors: The Bitter Tea of General Yen and Meet John Doe for Frank Capra, Stella Dallas for King Vidor, The Lady Eve for Preston Sturges, Ball of Fire for Howard Hawks, and Double Indemnity for Billy Wilder. Barbara carried her success lightly; her attitude was one of utter professionalism and no noticeable temperament. As far as she was concerned, she was simply one of a hundred or so people gathered to make a movie—no more, no less.

Spending time around her house, I came across a cache of 16mm movies in her basement. It turned out that Barbara [Stanwyck] had a lot of her own movies, and I convinced her to spend some time watching them with me. I ran the projector. She had prints of Union Pacific, Ball of Fire, and Baby Face, among others. She didn't particularly like watching them, but she did enjoy reminiscing about their production: how she got the part, what the location was like, that sort of thing. She liked people with humor and always spoke highly of Gary Cooper, Joel McCrea, and Frank Capra. Oddly enough, she wasn't crazy about Preston Sturges; she seemed to feel that he expended all his charm and humor for his movies and that there wasn't anything left for his actors. In broad outline, all this sounds a little bit like the scene in Sunset Boulevard where Gloria Swanson sits with William Holden and watches a scene from Queen Kelly, rhapsodizing about her own face. But Barbara couldn't have cared less about how she looked; as I watched her films with her, it was clear that, for her, the movies were a job she loved, as well as a social occasion for a woman who was otherwise something of a loner.

That era provided a profusion of wonderful actors and actresses to admire—and not always the ones remembered by posterity. Take Joel McCrea, for instance, a real cowboy and a good actor who could excel in westerns like Union Pacific or The Virginian, but who was also wonderful in comedies like The Palm Beach Story for Preston Sturges—and comedy is the hardest thing an actor can do.