Top 120 Francis Ford Coppola Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The things you get fired for when you’re young are the same things that you get lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

2. “There’s nothing creative about living within your means.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

3. “Drinking wine is just a part of life, like eating food.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

4. “The essence of cinema is editing.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

5. “My talent is that I just try and try and try and try again and little by little it comes to something...”

— Francis Ford Coppola

6. “Wine is so much more than a beverage. It’s a romance, a story, a drama-all of those things that are basically putting on a show.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

Featured in: Romance Quotes

7. “An essential element of any art is risk. If you don’t take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn’t been seen before?”

— Francis Ford Coppola

8. “We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

9. “I think it’s better to be overly ambitious and fail than to be underambitious and succeed in a mundane way. I have been very fortunate. I failed upward in my life!”

— Francis Ford Coppola

10. “I have always credited the writer of the original material above the title: Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or John Grisham’s The Rainmaker. I felt that I didn’t have the right to Francis Coppola’s anything unless I had written the story and the screenplay.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

11. “When you make a film it is like asking yourself a question. When it is finished, you know the answer. Ultimately with all of cinema, we are just trying to learn about ourselves. I have always used the opportunity to make a film to learn more about myself, which I am still doing.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

12. “The whole reason one wants to do lower budget films is because the lower the budget, the bigger the ideas, the bigger the themes, the more interesting the art.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

13. “I like simplicity; I don’t need luxury.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

14. “I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In ‘The Godfather’ it was succession. In ‘The Conversation’ it was privacy. In ‘Apocalypse’ it was morality.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

15. “My film is not a movie; it’s not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

16. “The essence of cinema is editing. It’s the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

17. “If you’re not allowed to experiment anymore for fear of being considered self-indulgent or pretentious or what have you, then everyone’s going to just stick to the rules – there’s not going to be any additional ideas.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

18. “Music is a big factor in helping the illusion of the film come to life. The same way music brings back different periods of our lives.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

19. “You don’t have to specialize – do everything that you love and then, at some time, the future will come together for you in some form.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

20. “I like to work in the morning. I like to sometimes go to a place where I’m all alone where I’m not going to get a phone call early that hurts my feelings, because once my feelings are hurt, I’m dead in the water.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

21. “I have much to learn from my daughter Sofia. Her minimalism exposes my limitations: I’m too instinctive and operatic, I put too much heart into my work, I get lost sometimes in bizarre things – it’s my Italian heritage.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

22. “When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

23. “When I was about 9, I had polio, and people were very frightened for their children, so you tended to be isolated. I was paralyzed for a while, so I watched television.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

24. “Death is what makes life an event.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

25. “My family were symphonic musicians and in the opera. Also, it was my era, the love of radio. We used to listen to the radio at night, close our eyes and see movies far more beautiful than you can photograph.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

26. “In kindergarten that used to be my job, to tell them fairytales. I liked Hans Christian Andersen, and the Grimm fairy tales, all the classic fairy tales.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

27. “Anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

28. “You ought to love what you’re doing because, especially in a movie, over time you really will start to hate it.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

29. “When a movie is about to come out on its initial debut, there are a lot of people involved – the financiers, the studio and the producers and also, many times, the foreign distributors. So it is a time of tremendous pressure and uncertainty.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

30. “When I was 13, I worked for Western Union. When the telegrams came in, I would glue them on the paper and deliver them on my bicycle.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

31. “To make great movies, there is an element of risk. You have to say, ‘Well, I am going to make this film, and it is not really a sure thing.’”

— Francis Ford Coppola

32. “Roger Corman exploited all of the young people who worked for him, but he really gave you responsibility and opportunity. So it was kind of a fair deal.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

33. “Usually, the stuff that’s your best idea or work is going to be attacked the most.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

34. “So much of the art of film is to do less. To aspire to do less.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

35. “Time is the lens through which dreams are captured.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

36. “A director is the ringmaster of a circus that’s inventing itself.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

37. “I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

38. “You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you’ll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

39. “Work on nothing less than epic scale.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

40. “People feel the worst film I made was ‘Jack.’ But to this day, when I get checks from old movies I’ve made, ‘Jack’ is one of the biggest ones. No one knows that. If people hate the movie, they hate the movie. I just wanted to work with Robin Williams.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

41. “We were raised in an Italian-American household, although we didn’t speak Italian in the house. We were very proud of being Italian, and had Italian music, ate Italian food.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

42. “I don’t think there’s any artist of any value who doesn’t doubt what they’re doing.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

43. “Ten Days That Shook The World, by Eisenstein, I went to see it, and I was so impressed with this film, so impressed with what cinema could do.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

44. “I believe that filmmaking – as, probably, is everything – is a game you should play with all your cards, and all your dice, and whatever else you’ve got. So, each time I make a movie, I give it everything I have. I think everyone should, and I think everyone should do everything they do that way.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

45. “The most adventurous thing I’ve done is learn how to fly a helicopter in the Philippines. One night we landed on a beach and slept on it.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

46. “I was interested in the idea of succession – showing a father and a son both in their own time and drawing a contrast.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

47. “The only TV I would be interested in exploring would be live television. There’s no substitute for a team of artists performing at their peak live when failure is possible. It’s a high-wire act. That excites me.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

48. “Films and hotels have many aspects that are the same. For example, there is always a big vision, an idea.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

49. “When I do a novel, I don’t really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

50. “I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist, the solo flute for Toscanini.”

— Francis Ford Coppola

Featured in: Strong Quotes