This film cost $31 million. With that kind of money I could have invaded some country.

You`ve got to ask yourself one question: `Do I feel lucky?` Well, do ya punk?

I love every aspect of the creation of motion pictures and I guess I am committed to it for life.

Most people who`ll remember me, if at all, will remember me as an action guy, which is OK. There`s nothing wrong with that. But there will be a certain group which will remember me for the other films, the ones where I took a few chances. At least, I like to think so.

There`s only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I`ll get married again.

If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.

[to Eli Wallach prior to starting work on Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il (1966) ("The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly")] Never trust anyone on an Italian movie. I know about these things. Stay away from special effects and explosives.

[on directing] Most people like the magic of having it take a long time and be difficult . . . but I like to move along, I like to keep the actors feeling like they`re going somewhere, I like the feeling of coming home after every day and feeling like you`ve done something and you`ve progressed somewhere. And to go in and do one shot after lunch and another one maybe at six o`clock and then go home is not my idea of something to do.

[what he says after a take, instead of "Cut!"] That`s enough of that shit.

Probably the lousiest western ever made. - On Ambush at Cimarron Pass (1958)

I like working with actors who don`t have anything to prove.

In those days, they`d make interview tests, not acting tests. They`d sit you in front of the camera and talk- just as we`re talking now. I thought I was an absolute clod. It looked pretty good; it was photographed well, but I thought, `If that`s acting, I`m in trouble.` But they signed me up as a contract player- which was a little lower than working in the mail-room.

I was tired of playing the nice, clean-cut cowboy in "Rawhide" (1959), I wanted something earthier. Something different from the old-fashioned Western. You know: Hero rides in, very stalwart, with white hat, man`s beating a horse, hero jumps off, punches man, schoolmarm walks down the street, sees this situation going on, slight conflict with schoolmarm, but not too much. You know schoolmarm and hero will be together in exactly 10 more reels, if you care to sit around and wait, and you know the man beast horse with eventually get comeuppance from hero this guy bushwhacks him in reel nine. But [Per un pugno di dollari (1964)] was different; it definitely had satiric overtones. The hero was an enigmatic figure, and that worked within the context of this picture. In some films, he would be ludicrous. You can`t have a cartoon in the middle of a Renoir.

Macho was a fashionable word in the 1980s. Everybody was kind of into it, what`s macho and what isn`t macho. I really don`t know what macho is. I never have understood. Does it mean somebody who swaggers around exuding testosterone? And kicks the gate open and runs sprints up and down the street? Or does handsprings or whatever? Or is macho a quiet thing based on your security. I remember shaking hands with Rocky Marciano. He was gentle, he didn`t squeeze your hand. And he had a high voice. But he could knock people around, it was a given. That`s macho. Muhammad Ali is the same. If you talked with him in his younger years, he spoke gently. He wasn`t kicking over chairs. I think some of the most macho people are the gentlest.

[on Sergio Leone] I spun off Sergio and he spun off me. I think we worked well together. I like his compositions. He has a very good eye. I liked him, I liked his sense of humor, but I feel it was mutual. He liked dealing with the kind of character I was putting together.

[on John Wayne] I gave him a piece of material that I thought had potential for us to do as a younger guy and an older guy. He wrote me back critical of it. He had seen High Plains Drifter (1973), and he didn`t think that represented Americana like She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and other John Ford westerns. I never answered him.

[on the Iraq war] I wasn`t for going in there. Only because democracy isn`t something that you get overnight. I don`t think America got democracy overnight. It`s something we had to fight for and believe in.

[on President George W. Bush] You`ve got to admire somebody who stands up for what they believe regardless of how the polls go. A lot of presidents do everything by the polls. They do a focus group then all of a sudden they say, "OK, that`s what I`m going to be for because that`s where focus group is leading me.

[on the Iraq war] My druthers would have been, "Get a more benevolent dictator and stick him in. You know, try somebody a little less mean." You don`t go in there and fire the army. The army`s got to do something. When you fire `em, you leave them all unemployed. Worst thing in the world. Just get somebody else who they respect and bring him on your side. That`s one way of doing it.

Life is a constant class, and once you think you know it all, you`re due to decay. You`re due to slide. I have to keep challenging myself and try something I haven`t done before. The studios aren`t always happy with that. When I wanted to make Mystic River (2003), the studio said, "Uh-oh, it`s so dark." And I said, "Well, it`s important. And it`s a nice story." Then the next movie, Million Dollar Baby (2004), they said, "Who wants to see a picture about a girl boxing?" And I said, "It`s really a father-daughter love story. Boxing just happens to be what`s going on." They didn`t have much faith. So there are always obstacles and people afraid to take risks. That`s why you end up with remakes of old TV shows as movies. But playing it safe is what`s risky, because nothing new comes out of it.

As for me, I like being behind the camera instead of in front of it. I can wear what I want. Will I act again? I never say never. I like doing things where I can stretch and go in different directions. I`m not looking to take it easy. Like the Marines on Iwo Jima, I understand that if you really want something, you have to be ready to fight.

I guess if you see both of the movies [Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)] together, they sum up as an antiwar film. Whether it`s about territory or religion, war is horrifyingly and depressingly archaic. But I didn`t set out to make a war movie. I cared about those three fellows - Bradley, Hayes and Gagnon [John H. Bradley, Ira H. Hayes, `René A. Gagnon`] - the headliners on that war-bond circus. The young men were taken off the front lines, wined and dined, introduced to movie stars. But it felt wrong to them.

The Americans who went to Iwo Jima knew it would be a tough fight, but they always believed they`d win. The Japanese were told they wouldn`t come home - they were being sent to die for the Emperor. People have made a lot out of that very different cultural approach. But as I got into the storytelling for the two movies [Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)], I realised that the 19-year-olds from both sides had the same fears. They all wrote poignant letters home saying: "I don`t want to die." They were all going through the same thing, despite the cultural differences.

I was a teenager when the battle of Iwo Jima took place. I remember hearing about the bond drive and the need to maintain the war effort. Back then, people had just come through 10 years of a Depression, and they were used to working for everything. I still have an image of someone coming to our house when I was about six years old, offering to cut and stack the wood in our back yard if my mother would make him a sandwich.

Every movie I make teaches me something, and that`s why I keep making them. I`m at that stage of life when I could probably stop and just hit golf balls. But in filming these two movies about Iwo Jima, I learnt about war and about character. I also learnt a lot about myself.

I also wonder how I got this far in life. Growing up, I never knew what I wanted to do. I was not a terribly good student or a very vivacious, outgoing person. I was just kind of a backward kid. I grew up in various little towns and ended up in Oakland, California, going to a trade school. I didn`t want to be an actor, because I thought an actor had to be an extrovert - somebody who loved to tell jokes and talk and be a raconteur. And I was something of an introvert. My mother used to say: "You have a little angel on your shoulder." I guess she was surprised I grew up at all, never mind that I got to where I am. The best I can do is quote a line from Unforgiven (1992): "Deserve`s got nothing to do with it."

Guys I thought of as heroes were like Joe Louis and, maybe during the war, there was General [George S. Patton], of course, and maybe [Dwight D. Eisenhower], who was the head of the Allied forces. And Gary Cooper. There were just a handful of men and a handful of women. Now, people become stars who are just heiresses or something.

I always cry when I watch myself on screen.

If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.

I never considered myself a cowboy, because I wasn`t. But I guess when I got into cowboy gear I looked enough like one to convince people that I was.

[On John Huston] It`s another aspect of the character that pleased me: he was interested in other things besides his art. He liked women, gambling, living the high life. He could have a life parallel to his work. I could identify with this type of behavior. But, because of this very fact, he became attracted more and more by other things, so that what interested him in life moved him away from his art to the point that he nearly lived a tragedy. And the tragedy brings him back to reality. If you study Huston`s life, you realize that at the age of nineteen he thought he didn`t have long to live because of a heart defect a doctor has notified him of as a result of a misdiagnosis. It drove him to elaborate a personal philosophy according to which he would profit from life to the maximum. He didn`t take care of himself - he was a confirmed smoker, a heavy drinker - and yet he lived to be more than eighty. Paul Newman spoke to me about him when we were acting at the same time, each in a different movie, in Tucson, Arizona. He was starring in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) and I was doing Joe Kidd (1972) with John Sturges. Huston drank martinis and smoked cigars all night long, slept from one o`clock to four o`clock in the morning because he was an insomniac, did everything he shouldn`t do to live to be old, and yet he died at a very great age! It was the same thing with John Wayne, who was first of all the opposite of a health fanatic.

[when asked if he has disappointed his conservative fans by directing Million Dollar Baby (2004)] Well, I got a big laugh out of that. These people are always bitching about "Hollyweird", and then they start bitching about this film. Are they all so mad because The Passion of the Christ (2004) is only up for the makeup award and a couple of other minor things? Extremism is so easy. You`ve got your position, and that`s it. It doesn`t take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right you meet the same idiots coming around from the left.

When I was doing The Bridges of Madison County (1995), I said to myself, "This romantic stuff is really tough. I can`t wait to get back to shooting and killing."

[when asked if he is still registered as a Republican] Yes, I am. I started - I enrolled as a Republican in 1951 when Dwight D. Eisenhower was running. And I was in the military. I was a fan of his. And that`s how I got started off. I was never - my parents were mixed, I think one Republican, one Democrat, so I didn`t have any grand-pappies to influence me.

[on former President Ronald Reagan] Yes, I liked him very much. When he was a former president of the Screen Actors Guild, I don`t think he had the vast support that a lot of other presidents have had. So I don`t know why that is, it`s just the nature of things.

I`ve actually had people come up to me and ask me to autograph their guns.

I`ve always had the ability to say to the audience, watch this if you like, and if you don`t, take a hike.

Whatever success I`ve had is due to a lot of instinct and a little luck.

My involvement goes deeper than acting or directing. I love every aspect of the creation of motion pictures and I guess I`m committed to it for life.

I like to play the line and not wander too far to either side. If a guy has just had a bad day in the mines and wants to see a good shoot `em up, that`s great.

Maybe I`m getting to the age when I`m starting to be senile or nostalgic or both, but people are so angry now. You used to be able to disagree with people and still be friends. Now you hear these talk shows, and everyone who believes differently from you is a moron and an idiot - both on the Right and the Left.

I`ve done a lot of violent movies, especially in the early days. My recent efforts, like The Bridges of Madison County (1995), weren`t too violent. In recent years I`ve done less, and, yes, I am concerned about violence in film. In `92, when I did Unforgiven (1992), which is a film that had a very anti- violence and anti-gun play - anti-romanticizing of gun play theme, I remember that Gene Hackman was concerned about it, and we both discussed the issue of too much violence in films. It`s escalated ninety times since Dirty Harry (1971) and those films were made.

[on World War II] I feel terrible for both sides in that war and in all wars. A lot of innocent people get sacrificed. It`s not about winning or losing, but mostly about the interrupted lives of young people.

I`ve thought about retiring for years now. When I did "Play Misty for Me" in 1970, I thought that if I could pull this off maybe I could step behind the camera, and it would be time to see the end of me. Every year I have threatened to do that - and here I am. So it may come sooner than you think.

I`ve always supported a certain amount of gun control. I think California has always had a mandatory waiting period, so we were never concerned about it like the rest of the country. Some states didn`t have any at all. So I`ve always supported that. I think it`s very important that guns don`t get in the wrong hands, and, yes, I would support most of that. I don`t know too much about trigger locks. I`ve never really discussed that with anyone. But I do feel that guns - it`s very important to keep them out of the hands of felons or anyone who might be crazy with it.

They say marriages are made in Heaven. But so is thunder and lightning.

This film cost $31 million. With that kind of money I could have invaded some country.

The reason I became a Republican is because [Dwight D. Eisenhower] was running. A hero from World War II, a charismatic individual, a military man, a non-attorney - even then I liked that! I was a very young person voting for the first time. A lot of people joke that a conservative is a liberal who`s made his first $100,000 and then decides,"Wait a second, I want to save this, why are they taxing it away?". Today the country`s in kind of a turmoil over taxing. Being raised in the thirties, watching my parents work hard to make ends meet, with jobs scarce, and then the war years - it tends to make a person a little more fiscally conscious than if you`ve been born into a wealthier family. You know, if you go to most people who are self-made and ask them what their political philosophy is, usually they`re a little more conservative than people who had a better start.

I don`t believe in pessimism. If something doesn`t come up the way you want, forge ahead.

I don`t like the wimp syndrome. No matter how ardent a feminist may be, if she is a heterosexual female, she wants the strength of a male companion as well as the sensitivity. The most gentle people in the world are macho males, people who are confident in their masculinity and have a feeling of well-being in themselves. They don`t have to kick in doors, mistreat women, or make fun of gays.

There`s a rebel lying deep in my soul. Anytime anybody tells me the trend is such and such, I go the opposite direction. I hate the idea of trends. I hate imitation; I have a reverence for individuality. I got where I am by coming off the wall. I`ve always considered myself too individualistic to be either right-wing or left-wing.

[on how he decided to do Per un pugno di dollari (1964)] I`d done "Rawhide" (1959) for about five years. The agency called and asked if I was interested in doing a western in Italy and Spain. I said, "Not particularly." They said, "Why don`t you give the script a quick look?" Well, I was kind of curious, so I read it, and I recognized it right away as Yojimbo (1961), a Kurosawa [Akira Kurosawa] film I had liked a lot. Over I went, taking the poncho with me - yeah the cape was my idea.

None of the pictures I take a risk in cost a lot, so it doesn`t take much for them to turn a profit. We don`t deal in big budgets. We know what we want and we shoot it and we don`t waste anything. I never understand these films that cost twenty, thirty million dollars when they could be made for half that. Maybe it`s because no one cares. We care.

You have to trust your instincts. There`s a moment when an actor has it, and he knows it. Behind the camera you can feel the moment even more clearly. And once you`ve got it, once you feel it, you can`t second-guess yourself. You can find a million reasons why something didn`t work. But if it feels right, and it looks right, it works. Without sounding like a pseudointellectual dipshit, it`s my responsibility to be true to myself. If it works for me, it`s right.

I think people jumped to conclusions about Dirty Harry (1971) without giving the character much thought, trying to attach right-wing connotations to the film that were never really intended. Both the director [Don Siegel] and I thought it was a basic kind of drama - what do you do when you believe so much in law and order and coming to the rescue of people and you just have five hours to solve a case? That kind of impossible effort was fun to portray, but I think it was interpreted as a pro-police point of view, as a kind of rightist heroism, at a time in American history when police officers were looked down on as "pigs", as very oppressive people - I`m sure there are some who are, and a lot who aren`t. I`ve met both kinds.

In The Bridges of Madison County (1995) Kincaid`s a peculiar guy. Really, he`s kind of a lonely individual. He`s sort of a lost soul in mid-America. I`ve been that guy.

I feel very close to the western. There are not too many American art forms that are original. Most are derived from European art forms. Other than the western and jazz or blues, that`s all that`s really original.

The plan was, when I first started directing in the 1970s, to get more involved in production and directing so at some point in my life, when I decided I didn`t want to act anymore, I didn`t have to suit up.

Most people who`ll remember me, if at all, will remember me as an action guy, which is OK. There`s nothing wrong with that. But there will be a certain group which will remember me for the other films, the ones where I took a few chances. At least, I like to think so.

One of the first films I went to - I went with my dad because my mother didn`t want to go see a war movie - was Sergeant York (1941). My dad was a big admirer of Sergeant York stories from [World War I]. It was directed by Howard Hawks. That was when I first became aware of movies, who made them, who was involved.

[1985] My old drama coach used to say, "Don`t just do something, stand there." Gary Cooper wasn`t afraid to do nothing.

[2005 Academy Awards acceptance speech for Best Director] Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I`d like to thank my wife, who is my best pal down here. And my mother, who was here with me in 1993. She was only 84 then. But she`s here with me again tonight. And she just -- so, at 96, I`m thanking her for her genes. It was a wonderful adventure. It takes a -- to make a picture in 37 days, it takes a well-oiled machine. And that well-oiled machine is the crew -- the cast, of course, you`ve met a lot of them. But there`s still Margo and Anthony and Michael and Mike and Jay and everybody else who was so fabulous in this cast. And the crew, Campanelli. Billy Coe and, of course, Tom Stern, who is fantastic. And Henry Bumstead, the great Henry Bumstead who is the head of our crack geriatrics team. And Henry and Jack Taylor, and Dick Goddard [Richard C. Goddard], all those guys. Walt and everybody. I can`t think of everybody right now. I`m drawing a blank right now. But, Warren, you were right. And thank you, for your confidence earlier in the evening. I`m just lucky to be here. Lucky to be still working. And I watched Sidney Lumet, who is 80, and I figure, "I`m just a kid. I`ll just -- I`ve got a lot of stuff to do yet." So thank you all very much. Appreciate it.

[on trying to get Million Dollar Baby (2004) made at Warner Bros.] They might have been a little more interested if I said I wanted to do "Dirty Harry 9" or something.

Plastic surgery used to be a thing where older people would try to go into this dream world of being 28 years old again. But now, in Hollywood, even people at 28 are having work done. Society has made us believe you should look like an 18-year-old model all your life. But I figure I might as well just be what I am.

I liked the Million Dollar Baby (2004)` script a lot. Warner Bros. said the project had been submitted to them and they`d passed on it. I said, "But I like it." They said, "Well, it`s a boxing movie." And I said, "It`s not a boxing movie in my opinion. It`s a father-daughter love story, and it`s a lot of other things besides a boxing movie." They hemmed and hawed and finally said that if I wanted to take it, maybe they`d pay for the domestic rights only. After that, I`d be on my own. We took it to a couple of other studios, and they turned it down, much like Mystic River (2003) was turned down, the exact same pattern. People who kept calling and saying, "Come on, work with us on stuff." I`d give it to them, and they`d go, "Uh, we were thinking more in terms of Dirty Harry coming out of retirement." And who knows? Maybe when it comes out they`ll be proven right.

I think I`m on a track of doing pictures nobody wants to do, that they`re all afraid of. I guess it`s the era we live in, where they`re doing remakes of "The Dukes of Hazzard" (1979) and other old television shows. I must say, I`m not a negative person, but sometimes I wonder what kind of movies people are going to be making 10 years from now if they follow this trajectory. When I grew up there was such a variety of movies being made. You could go see Sergeant York (1941) or Sitting Pretty (1948) or Sullivan`s Travels (1941), dozens of pictures, not to mention all the great B movies. Now, they`re looking for whatever the last hit was. If it`s The Incredibles (2004), they want `The Double Incredibles.` My theory is they ought to corral writers into writers` buildings like they used to and start out with fresh material.

At the studios, everybody`s into sequels or remakes or adaptations of old TV shows. I don`t know if it`s because of the corporate environment or they`re just out of ideas. Pretty soon, they`re going to be wanting to do one of "Rawhide" (1959).

You know when you think of a particular director, you think you would have liked to be with them on one particular film and not necessarily on some other one.

...in America, instead of making the audience come to the film, the idea seems to be for you to go to the audience. They come up with the demographics for the film and then the film is made and sold strictly to that audience. Not to say that it`s all bad, but it leaves a lot of the rest of us out of it. To me cinema can be a much more friendly world if there`s a lot of things to choose from.

Again, after you`ve gone through all the various processes and the film comes out and is very successful, you`re almost afraid to revisit it. You want to save it for a rainy day.

There`s really no way to teach you how to act, but there is a way to teach you how to teach yourself to act. That`s kind of what it is; once you learn the little tricks that work for you, pretty soon you find yourself doing that.

I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don`t have a toy they`ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

Most people like the magic of having it take a long time and be difficult . . . but I like to move along, I like to keep the actors feeling like they`re going somewhere, I like the feeling of coming home after every day and feeling like you`ve done something and you`ve progressed somewhere. And to go in and do one shot after lunch and another one maybe at six o`clock and then go home is not my idea of something to do.

And I like to direct the same way that I like to be directed.

Nowadays you`d have many battles before you blow it up, but eventually you`d take it down. And that`s okay, I don`t heavily quarrel with that, but for me personally, having made films for years and directed for 33 years, it just seems to me that I long for people who want to see a story and see character development. Maybe we`ve dug it out and there`s not really an audience for that, but that`s not for me to really worry about.

Right now, the state of the movies in America, there`s an awful lot of people hanging on wires and floating across things and comic book characters and what have you. There seems to be a lot of big business in that, a nice return on some of those.

I love every aspect of the creation of motion pictures and I guess I am committed to it for life.

I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live.

My father used to say to me, "Show `em what you can do, and don`t worry about what you`re gonna get. Say you`ll work for free and make yourself invaluable."