Joseph L. Mankiewicz Quotations

I've been in on the beginning, the rise, peak, collapse and end of the talking picture.

I am a critic - as essential to the theatre as ants to a picnic.

I got a job at Metro and went in to see Louis Mayer, who told me he wanted me to be a producer. I said I wanted to write and direct. He said, No, you have to produce first, you have to crawl before you can walk. Which is as good a definition of producing as I ever heard.

There's nothing as real as money.

I'm not biting my fingernails. I'm biting my knuckles. I finished the fingernails months ago.

[Writers are] the highest paid secretaries in the world.

And Kate Hepburn-God, she's beautiful, God, she plays golf well, God, she can get anyone in the world on the phone, God, she knows what to do all the time, God, she wears clothes well.

In my last two years in high school, my face was pocked with pimples, I stammered when I spoke; if I made a mistake, I blushed furiously, and when nervous, as I was in the company of girls, I perspired freely.

All playwrights should be dead for three hundred years.

Please don't look at me as if you had a source of income other than your salary.