Mike Nichols famous quotes

03-23-2025

Thereâ€™s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what youâ€™re meant to do. Itâ€™s like falling in love.
-- Mike Nichols

#Falling In Love #Fall #Astonishment
I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. Thatâ€™s the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.
-- Mike Nichols

#Jobs #Keys #Veins
Any good movie is filled with secrets.
-- Mike Nichols

#Secret #Good Movie #Filled
A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.
-- Mike Nichols

#Persons
There's nothing in the American dream about character. It's a serious flaw.
-- Mike Nichols

#Dream #Character #Serious
The unconscious is our best collaborator.
-- Mike Nichols

#Consciousness #Unconscious
That seems to me the greatest American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.
-- Mike Nichols

#Alive #Appearance #Danger
Being with an insanely jealous person is like being in the room with a dead mammoth.
-- Mike Nichols

#Jealousy #Jealous #Rooms
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

#Long #Trying #Icy
The only safe thing is to take a chance. Play safe and you are dead. Taking risks is the essence of good work, and the difference between safe and bold can only be defined by yourself since no one else knows for what you are hoping when you embark on anything.
-- Mike Nichols

#Essence #Play #Differences
In making movies, time is so short-because it is so expensive-that we tend to neglect the place from which the best ideas come, namely that part of ourselves that dreams. The unconscious is our best collaborator.
-- Mike Nichols

#Dream #Writing #Ideas
I have never understood people dividing things into dramas and comedies,
-- Mike Nichols

#Drama #People #Comedy
Nerves provide me with energy... It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that's when I get worried.
-- Mike Nichols

#Nerves #Ease #Energy
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

#Fun #Suspense #Want
Take off all your clothes and walk down the street waving a machete and firing an Uzi, and terrified citizens will phone the police and report, There's a naked person outside!
-- Mike Nichols

#Clothes #Phones #Police
It's not a filmmaker's job to explain his technique but to tell his story the best way he can.
-- Mike Nichols

#Jobs #Stories #Way
I came to love silence, because it's so rare, and it's now my favorite aural condition.
-- Mike Nichols

#Silence #My Favorite #Silence Love
Yes. The whole point about laughter is itâ€™s like mercury: you canâ€™t catch it, you canâ€™t catch what motivates itâ€”thatâ€™s why itâ€™s funny,
-- Mike Nichols

#Laughter #Mercury
The only safe thing in filmmaking is to take a chance.
-- Mike Nichols

#Safe #Chance #Take A Chance
All the theories that acting is reacting to imaginary circumstances as though they are real, and directing is turning psychology into behavior, those are all stabs at something that can't be taught. All the great actors can't talk about what they do, and they don't want to begin to talk about it. They just do it.
-- Mike Nichols

#Real #Psychology #Theatre
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

#Mean #People #Earth
I was just trying to make a nice little movie... It wasn't until I saw it all put together that I realized this was something remarkable.
-- Mike Nichols

#Nice #Trying #Together

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