James Toback Quotations

I write fast, I write beautifully, I write convincingly.

Use people whom you're excited by and who share your excitement... The ideal collaboration is one in which the actor and director are saying to each other, 'I can't believe how lucky we are to be making a movie together.'

I know a star when I see one.

Much as I like getting awards in Oldenburg, Germany and Torino, it's nice to get one in America.

What am I hanging around for? But I'm hanging around because it's still fun.

Death is a part of life, and eventually I assimilated that completely.

The past is history, the future's a mystery.

The collaborator has to be someone who understands that his role is to help you articulate what you want, but at the same time is not just going to be mechanically obeying, but adding to, supplementing, and coming up with stuff.

[Robert Downey was being singled out for] selective prosecution. He's a sweet guy who never did harm to anyone except himself. He's been doing drugs for 20 years and functioning for 20 years, and in those 20 years there've been hundreds of people who've been getting high constantly and behaved very destructively and have not been arrested. Robert's real problem is he gets caught.

Most of my movies get about a third raves, a third vicious attacks, and a third in-between.

You will never convince anyone to do anything unless you believe it should be done.

To have six billion people on Earth, two billion of whom are carrying around a warped view of you? That has to register.

The idea that there aren't mistakes made constantly in the judicial system is too obvious even to need to mention.

I alternate between feeling incredibly lucky that I've gotten away with almost everything I wanted to do, and feeling like I've been shafted.

It's hard to give a dramatic shape to even the most dramatic life. . . . you are forced not just into selectivity, but into alteration, distortion and outright lying about what did and didn't happen.