Top 60 Sydney Pollack Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Editing feels almost like sculpting or a form of continuing the writing process.”

— Sydney Pollack

2. “All films are political, whether they mean to be or not. Star Wars is political. As soon as you have conflict, which is the key to most films, you have politics. It’s just that some are more artful with the handling of politics than others.”

— Sydney Pollack

3. “Making a film is a way for me to understand what it’s like to be a murderer, to confess, to be a beaten wife, to be a minority, to be a victor, to get the girl, to lose the girl. I can do all of that through the practice of an art form.”

— Sydney Pollack

4. “I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.”

— Sydney Pollack

5. “I didn’t believe that I’d ever be lucky enough to be able to make a living as an actor.”

— Sydney Pollack

6. “Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different.”

— Sydney Pollack

7. “Every film I’ve made has a kind of frustrated love story in the center of it. They were people who saw life from opposing points of view, which has been in every film I’ve ever done. It had all the ingredients of the kinds of films I like to do.”

— Sydney Pollack

8. “Relationship films are political. If a woman is sitting in a waiting room in an office and a man walks in and sits down, it’s a political situation. If he decides to smoke, does he ask her or does he just light up? If he lights up, what does she do? It’s politics.”

— Sydney Pollack

9. “You mustn’t regret decisions that you make. Because the decisions are made out of your gut in a way and you have to stick with them.”

— Sydney Pollack

10. “I think it’s a terrible shame that politics has become show business.”

— Sydney Pollack

11. “Well, I was born and raised in the Midwest, in Indiana specifically, and my childhood was full of weekend movies, you know, the Saturday and Sunday popcorn movies.”

— Sydney Pollack

12. “When you work without a script, you are in a sense working in a much more improvisational way than when you are prepared totally.”

— Sydney Pollack

13. “I don’t know about liberal bias, but people of a liberal mentality are probably attracted in greater numbers to the arts than people of a conservative mentality.”

— Sydney Pollack

14. “I make films, and I hope that people come to see them. If they don’t, I pay a big price. But I can’t make decisions where I would change my own standards or my own taste in order to court the public in some way.”

— Sydney Pollack

15. “When you spend your life acting and being other people, as opposed to being the one person that you are, you learn that life is gray sometimes, not black and white. That what you thought was true isn’t necessarily true if you switch sides.”

— Sydney Pollack

16. “There isn’t any question that Hollywood is profit driven. Anybody that thinks it isn’t is a fool. It’s a business. Hollywood was never philanthropy. The only purpose it had was making money; the only purpose it still has is to make money.”

— Sydney Pollack

17. “I mean, movies are like your kids or your fingers and toes or something, it’s pretty hard to pick favorites.”

— Sydney Pollack

18. “Film is a collective experience, as you know.”

— Sydney Pollack

19. “With a movie you’re creating from the beginning this particular work, let’s not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let’s just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art.”

— Sydney Pollack

20. “I love having made a film and watching it when it affects audiences in a positive way. It was always fun for me to hide in the back of a theater and watch Tootsie with an audience and hear them laugh. And it’s gratifying 20 years later to imagine that they still can find it amusing.”

— Sydney Pollack

21. “OK, I know this is going to disgust you, Michael, but a lot of people are in this business to make money.”

— Sydney Pollack

22. “People aren’t interested in paying $10 or $12 to go to the movies and to be lectured to politically. I’m not either. So I don’t try to make those kinds of films.”

— Sydney Pollack

23. “Every single art form is involved in film, in a way.”

— Sydney Pollack

24. “Burt Lancaster was largely responsible for me becoming a director.”

— Sydney Pollack

25. “I don’t consider myself a teacher of moral and political positions. I don’t want to be that. I can’t help but have a point of view when I make a film, but my first job is to entertain you.”

— Sydney Pollack

26. “Well, there’s no question that a good script is an absolutely essential, maybe the essential thing for a movie.”

— Sydney Pollack

27. “If we were a primitive society, movie stars would be gods.”

— Sydney Pollack

28. “I mean, I don’t know anything else that I would try to do, but it’s a very frustrating thing to do, because you are trying to take what’s a fantasy in your head and make it live through the minds of 200 people.”

— Sydney Pollack

29. “I have one life. I am a certain age. I’m married to one person. I have a certain number of children. I won’t have another life other than that, but I do have many lives through the films.”

— Sydney Pollack

30. “We talked about Tootsie, the idea in Tootsie is that a man becomes a better man for having been a woman.”

— Sydney Pollack

31. “No, I never went to college. Always regretted it, always envied people who did.”

— Sydney Pollack

32. “It’s always interesting to play people different from yourself, it would be boring for me to play myself.”

— Sydney Pollack

33. “And I taught acting for years, and without knowing it that was the real thing that started bending me toward directing.”

— Sydney Pollack

34. “Obviously its a good feeling to know that something you’ve done has lasted.”

— Sydney Pollack

35. “I didn’t grow up thinking of movies as film, or art, but as movies, something to do on a Saturday afternoon.”

— Sydney Pollack

36. “I mean, the truth of the matter is, I like the failures as much as I like the successes, it’s only the world that doesn’t like the failures.”

— Sydney Pollack

37. “When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.”

— Sydney Pollack

38. “I tend to be what I would call more progressive than conservative, but I think either extreme is excessive.”

— Sydney Pollack

39. “I see my job as trying to entertain you, to be balanced in some way, and morally responsible. I don’t want to glorify a killer. I don’t want to glorify a rapist. I don’t want to do those things, but on the other hand I don’t want to lecture to you, either.”

— Sydney Pollack

40. “For example, a man who might not have enormous charisma, who could be president 40 years ago, and who was a deserving president, I don’t know that George Washington would be a president today, I don’t know that Abe Lincoln would, I don’t know that Roosevelt would.”

— Sydney Pollack

41. “I personally have never made a movie in Hollywood, because I don’t want to get up in my own bed and then go to the movie set, and then come home at night to my real life.”

— Sydney Pollack

42. “My films ought to be judged on whether they’re entertaining or good as films, but not on the political view necessarily. I’m trying to be morally responsible and no more. I don’t have an agenda I’m trying to push.”

— Sydney Pollack

43. “I’ve produced my own films for twenty years now – it means I have to talk to less people.”

— Sydney Pollack

44. “One wants to be able to experience being other people, remaking a reality, remaking a life, remaking a certain world.”

— Sydney Pollack

45. “But, I’ve made films in Japan, in Yugoslavia, all over Europe, all over the United States, Mexico, but not Hollywood.”

— Sydney Pollack

46. “Most human beings who are accustomed to attempting to see the world from various points of view tend to be more liberal than conservative.”

— Sydney Pollack

47. “I’m not a very good predictor in any area of art, particularly my own. I don’t know how to evaluate that.”

— Sydney Pollack

48. “I mean, certainly it’s the single biggest event, I think, in terms of popular entertainment, or art even, if you say that, of the 20th Century. It’s been film. It’s the 20th Century’s real art form.”

— Sydney Pollack

49. “Well, the wonderful thing about making movies, oddly enough, is that they’re sort of highly motivated graduate studies in one or another field.”

— Sydney Pollack

50. “You can be moderate in a way and still intense in your views. It’s the extremism that gets frightening; religious fundamentalism and wacko-left liberalism is crazy.”

— Sydney Pollack