Robert Benton Quotations

Movie narration in the forties was radically different than the narrative involved in books.

Style tells you a lot more about the truth than substance, because it comes at the truth in an oblique way, it comes in on a slant, it doesn't tell you what it is. It's unexpected and it makes you laugh and think.

People who go for humor are wonderful because they do great humor. People who go for wit and end up with humor are people who have made a mistake.

After the war, photography came alive, in part because everybody started to use the 35mm camera, and worked on the street instead of in a studio, and that made an enormous difference in not only how photographs looked, but what they were about.

The thing I loved the most about being art director was picking the photographers and working with them.

I was dyslexic as a child and it took me years to get passed that. I read a lot but it was hard and that didn't go away until my early-to-mid-twenties. So really what I was looking at were the photographs and the illustrations in magazines.

Every since high school I've been drawn to magazines.

There was a kind of cultural life in New York that wasn't as solidified as it is now, it wasn't as money-driven. If you look at the size of the successful art galleries compared to the size of galleries now - there was no such thing as the Gagosian Gallery or Pace Gallery. But it was a time when magazines were a vital part of American life, and Esquire gave me a free pass to every world - I could get to the art world, the theater world, the movie world. It allowed you to roam through the cultural life of New York City.

Although I had a few jobs that I didn't like, or quit, or got fired from, I really loved New York from the moment I got here and I never stopped.

Everybody thought New York was this hard, cruel place, and I found it to be an extraordinarily wonderful place filled with the most interesting people.

Style is a way of talking about yourself.

The greatest style is when you can't see the style though you walk away knowing it was there. It's like a perfume - there but not there.

I couldn't sit down and write a novel or a short story - even now - because of my dyslexia. But I learned narration through movies.

Having one perfect thing was less important than having a range of ideas, realizing they were all taking you in a certain direction.

Sometimes other people have better ideas.

It's interesting that there are places that words can't get to.

Beauty doesn't have anything to do with prettiness. Beauty has to do with something else; it gets into an area where words can't go.

Style lasts forever and taste doesn't.

Style is the most ephemeral thing I know. It's not about how effective you are it's about how you are effective.

Taste has nothing to do with style.

All my life I've felt like somebody's wife, or somebody's mother or somebody's daughter. Even all the time we were together, I never knew who I was. And that's why I had to go away. And in California, I think I found myself.

My next film is always shaped by the last one... by the things I feel I didn't get right, or the things I like and want to try to develop further, but it always comes out of the last picture.

Style and taste do not have anything to do with the other. It's the difference between wit and humor.

In America, people rarely stay in the town where they grew up, rarely stay in close proximity to their parents throughout their lives. You rarely find parents in their old age being taken care of by their children.

I was dyslexic before anybody knew what dyslexia was. I was called 'slow'. It's an awful feeling to think of yourself as 'slow' - it's horrible.

My education was an education by movies.

New York was big enough and wide enough that it allowed for reasonably eccentric people like me to thrive. It was a perfect place for me.

I'd like to know what law is it that says that a woman is a better parent, simply by virtue of her sex.

Movies without meaningful dialogue play well all over the world. The Apostle is probably the best movie of the year, but it won't do squat in Korea.

Twilight is about getting older and relationships - not about a murder mystery. It's about love when you reach a certain age; nothing is in primary colors.