Top 50 David O. Russell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The great lesson about filmmaking is never take “no” for an answer, especially if you have a lot of passion and inspiration to do something.”

— David O. Russell

2. “The holy trifecta of directing and filmmaking is character emotion, camera movement and music. When you hit those three, that’s magical. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

— David O. Russell

3. “Anything you could ever want or be you already have and are.”

— David O. Russell

4. “Just work on your craft hard – that’s your only hope of doing anything worthwhile.”

— David O. Russell

5. “That’s the most beautiful thing that I like about boxing: you can take a punch. The biggest thing about taking a punch is your ego reacts and there’s no better spiritual lesson than trying to not pay attention to your ego’s reaction.”

— David O. Russell

6. “There’s always hope. Never give up. Walk slowly and drink lots of water. It ain’t a sprint.”

— David O. Russell

7. “It’s easier to control people when they’re afraid.”

— David O. Russell

8. “Life just happens the way it’s supposed to happen. It delivers you to where it delivers you.”

— David O. Russell

9. “Gay marriage is a complete red herring to distract everyone from the economy and the war and health care and education.”

— David O. Russell

10. “The whole trick is to make it feel like you’re spying on real people’s lives as they get through the day. When I’m writing, I have to trick myself as a writer. If I consciously say, ‘I’m writing,’ I feel all this pressure and somehow it doesn’t feel as real as when it doesn’t seem to count as much.”

— David O. Russell

11. “I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you’re basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you’re creating a song or a narrative out of it.”

— David O. Russell

12. “The gift of life is the gift to suffer sometimes and to embrace it, heartbreak and all.”

— David O. Russell

13. “Quite frankly, the bible is filled with advice that you’d never, want to follow. “Don’t cut your hair on a rainy Thursday because locusts will eat your farm” kind of thing.”

— David O. Russell

14. “I got a nomination for director, which means the world to me; it’s just the most exciting thing for me and my family. You do the good hard work, and the rest of it is something you shouldn’t get too caught up in, but when it happens – boy! I respect it.”

— David O. Russell

15. “You learn by trying and failing. Just a lot of hard work and mistakes.”

— David O. Russell

16. “I think any spiritual experience that’s worthwhile is not about ego and it will humble you in some way. And also, a Zen monk once said to me, ‘If you’re not laughing, then you’re not getting it.’”

— David O. Russell

17. “You know, veterans come home and they may not be bipolar, but after they’ve been through a war with PTSD or a head injury, their families have a handful when they come home.”

— David O. Russell

18. “You can’t force a movie to happen. Movies happen when they’re supposed to happen. Everything happens in God’s time. I really believe that.”

— David O. Russell

19. “The closer you stay to emotional authenticity and people, character authenticity, the less you can go wrong. That’s how I feel now, no matter what you’re doing.”

— David O. Russell

20. “What do we have in life, really? If we’re lucky we get to a certain age, and we have each other. We have the food we like. We have our crazy little rituals. And we have each other.”

— David O. Russell

21. “The Fighter was about a family struggling to overcome and fighting each other sometimes, and I went back and rewrote this script which I had written for my son initially because my son has mood disorder.”

— David O. Russell

22. “I did a dance sequence in my second short film, which was my best short film, called ‘Hairway to the Stars,’ and I think Chris Wink, the founder of Blue Man Group, was in that. It’s a black-and-white dance sequence. We were Glorious Food waiters together.”

— David O. Russell

23. “It’s absurd that we’re so quick to criticize Muslims for being fundamentalist when Christians can be just as extreme and fanatical and frightening.”

— David O. Russell

24. “The cinema that I make is a cinema about people, emotion, humanity and passion. It’s not just about what they struggle through, but what they live for. That’s what I love. The music they love, the people they love, the clothing, the hair and the life that they love.”

— David O. Russell

25. “I was frustrated because I couldn’t get going, as I was trying to figure out how to make films. I had various jobs, I taught a SAT class, I was a bartender, I had a day job at an office and was making short films.”

— David O. Russell

26. “To be honest, I think that Republicans love terrorism.”

— David O. Russell

27. “And that is also what the movie’s about, going beyond success, what is success ’cause I think success is misperceived as just a cake and it isn’t. There is many things inside that success. There’s a maturity and a heartbreak and sadness and broken glass.”

— David O. Russell

28. “There’s nothing better than an actor who is really, really hungry to show everything they’ve got.”

— David O. Russell

29. “Some of Jimmy Stewart’s performance in ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ is some of the most disturbing performance he ever did, when he falls apart and when he breaks down.”

— David O. Russell

30. “I just love real characters; they’re not pretentious, and every emotion is on the surface, they’re regular working people. Their likes, their dislikes, their loves, their hates, their passions; they’re all right there on the surface.”

— David O. Russell

31. “That’s just how I see things. I think things that are the most dramatic or tragic can also look the most ridiculous and funny. That’s part of being human.”

— David O. Russell

32. “Unhappy endings can be as cheap as happy endings.”

— David O. Russell

33. “I make every movie and every scene like it could be my last. That’s the only way I know how to make cinema that stands on its feet. I have to treat it like that. It has to be life and death stakes.”

— David O. Russell

34. “There’s nothing better than having a collaborator that you have a great shorthand with and a great comfort with who’s shepherding the project along. I mean, that’s the best thing that can happen in cinema where there’s many cooks in the kitchen.”

— David O. Russell

35. “The endings for all my characters seem sufficiently human and messy for me to feel comfortable with them. In some ways they have only moved an inch, but sometimes an inch is a great distance.”

— David O. Russell

36. “It’s my experience that endings are never easy, and I think I’m not alone among filmmakers or writers in this.”

— David O. Russell

37. “I feel profoundly blessed. I feel it’s a great privilege to make any motion picture.”

— David O. Russell

38. “I hadn’t made that movie before and when I ever met the real Joy Mangano, which happened because De Niro insisted we meet her and her father, that’s what she felt like to us. She impressed us with her quiet, serene authority with herself.”

— David O. Russell

39. “One of the things I’ve discovered at my age is I must have enchantment. And that was not clear to me in my earlier years. When I look at my favorite films, the Frank Capra – even Scorsese, even ‘Goodfellas,’ what makes that movie so remarkable is there’s enchantment in their world.”

— David O. Russell

40. “You should always make it like it’s your last film. That’s my personal belief. Every filmmaker is going to have another belief. That’s the only way I know to try to make a film that might be good. You got to take it real seriously like it’s your last thing.”

— David O. Russell

41. “A thousand years ago, scientists who wondered about consciousness and the nature of reality were burned at the stake. We still haven’t recovered from that and it’s left us with a culture that no longer investigates consciousness, except on the fringes.”

— David O. Russell

42. “The religion itself may have some great ideas, but I can’t take it seriously if it’s blatantly exclusionary.”

— David O. Russell

43. “I’m always looking for a way to surprise audiences. That’s, I feel, my job as a director. I felt that Amy Adams playing a tough woman in ‘The Fighter’ was a surprise. People saw her as a princess.”

— David O. Russell

44. “I think audiences deserve the benefit of the doubt. I prefer to be surprised by them rather then just assume they’ll react negatively to any new idea.”

— David O. Russell

45. “It’s a closing of the mind that happens when you want to be lazy and go with the easiest answers, like the media do all the time in their sound bytes.”

— David O. Russell

46. “When most people turn on their TVs, they don’t expect a frank discussion of philosophical ideas in their practical context. Or any context.”

— David O. Russell

47. “And if you can come through that and still have some connection to your joy you felt when you were a child that’s a very mature kind of a joy that I find inspiring. And Jennifer Lowrence has all that in her, and I’ve watched her have to go through it even in the last few years.”

— David O. Russell

48. “The Republicans just want to bankrupt the government. They think that the government should do nothing, except maybe support the military. So terrorism is perfect for them.”

— David O. Russell

49. “I suppose what I like about Zen is that the teachers are constantly questioning your insight and challenging it, looking for sloppiness or laziness in it, and ways you can go past that.”

— David O. Russell

50. “I think if religion closes discussion or exchange of ideas or curiosity about other views, it’s not true to its core.”

— David O. Russell