Francis Ford Coppola Quotes

Quotes by and about Francis Ford Coppola

(Continued from his main entry on the site.)

Coppola: "[I have an] incorrigible imagination."

Coppola: "I have more of a vivid imagination than I have talent. I cook up ideas. It's just a characteristic."

Coppola: "Without a doubt, I was born to want to make cinema, but the kind of cinema I want to make is not like commercial movies, which I enjoy myself, but I wanted to be the kind of filmmaker who wrote original work, sort of like a novelist ... who deals with who we are and our times or our relationships."

Coppola: "[Making] a movie is like answering a question."

Coppola: "Vision is my fun. ... When you do [a] big project, you can take from everything that you've done and ... synthesize."

Coppola: "I have a couple rules in my life. The first is never to lie. I was impressed by a line, I think it's Joseph Conrad: 'Nothing is more repugnant than the stench of lie.' Lying always leads to a pyramid of lying, and after a while you don't know where the lie was yourself. But if you have a rule never to lie, you can never get caught in a lie. If someone asks you if they're beautiful and they're ugly, you can always just say that it's an inappropriate question to ask."

Coppola: "[My daughter Sofia] already has such a personal style that you don't even need to see the credits and you know she made it. ... That's the highest thing you can aspire to."

Coppola: "I'm the one who started giving numbers to movies with 'Godfather I' and 'Godfather II.' Hollywood ran with that and now [Hollywood] is only a sequel film business."
[Interviewer: "So in other words we have you to blame for Transformers 3?"]
Coppola: "You do. And I am ashamed of it."

Coppola: "I have no respect for what [Hollywood] has done to the film business."

Coppola: "[Everything] really all comes down to ... acceptance of the truth, or the struggle to accept the truth. And the truth has to do with good and evil, and life and death - and don't forget that we see these things as opposites, or we want to see them as opposites, but they are one. ... You must accept that you have the whole."

Coppola: "When I was a kid, I always thought I was a scientific genius. Today, as I sit here right now, I think I have genius but no [artistic] talent, really. I mean, I know film directors - Roman Polanski is one, and David Lynch, who did 'The Elephant Man,' is another one - who just have that talent. They're like the kids who could draw in school. ... That kind of talent I don't have. My talent was more like something that came out of wanting it."

Coppola: "I think people are afraid of me. ... They're afraid that if I ever got like too much power, I'd change their lives - and they're right!"

Coppola: "Everything I said has come true."

The Independent: "Coppola always seemed a man out of his time."