Burt Lancaster was largely responsible for me becoming a director.
- Sydney Pollack Quote

But, I've made films in Japan, in Yugoslavia, all over Europe, all over the United States, Mexico, but not Hollywood.
- Sydney Pollack Quote

By that I mean, I think that it is true that politics and political heroes have to satisfy our need to be greater than mortal in some way, and that's led them into creating illusions, sound bites, focus groups that tell you what to do.
- Sydney Pollack Quote

Every single art form is involved in film, in a way.
- Sydney Pollack Quote

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 Quote

I didn't believe that I'd ever be lucky enough to be able to make a living as an actor.
- Sydney Pollack Quote

I didn't grow up thinking of movies as film, or art, but as movies, something to do on a Saturday afternoon.
- Sydney Pollack Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

I mean, movies are like your kids or your fingers and toes or something, it's pretty hard to pick favorites.
- Sydney Pollack Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

No, I never went to college. Always regretted it, always envied people who did.
- Sydney Pollack Quote

Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different.
- Sydney Pollack Quote

We talked about Tootsie, the idea in Tootsie is that a man becomes a better man for having been a woman.
- Sydney Pollack Quote

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 Quote

Well, there's no question that a good script is an absolutely essential, maybe the essential thing for a movie.
- Sydney Pollack Quote

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 Quote

You are not an active creator of the film.
- Sydney Pollack Quote

You don't normally do another presentation of All About Eve. You do one All About Eve, and that's it.
- Sydney Pollack Quote