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Chance is another name that we give to our mistakes. And all of the best things in my films are mistakes.

Robert Altman

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Robert Altman
Age: 81 †
Born: 1925
Born: February 20
Died: 2006
Died: November 20
Film Director
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Film Producer
Librettist
Screenwriter
Theatrical Director
Writer
Kansas City
Missouri
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More quotes by Robert Altman

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That wasn't an ending. It was just a stopping point.
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Words don't tell you what people are thinking. Rarely do we use words to really tell. We use words to sell people or to convince people or to make them admire us. It's all disguise. It's all hidden -- a secret language.
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You will never see'Altman's Great Film of the Seventies: The Director's Cut' because you have never seen a film of mine that wasn't the director's cut. I have never permitted it.
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They'll never give me an Oscar. And I sincerely, honestly don't care. I always turn up when I'm nominated and it would be nice to get one, but to win one would be bad luck. It comes with too much expectation. It would be the end.
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The minute you have more than one voice, you have more possibilities opening up. You have all the molecules in all of those bodies and their make up interacting.
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I have never made a movie that's attracted a 14-year-old boy.
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I don't know what Altmanesque means, though I suppose I'm flattered by it.
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The Oscar for the films, it'd be nice. But I don't make those kind of films, and I don't think that will ever happen.
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If something works for you, you continue to do it. I did a bunch of pictures for 20th Century Fox when Alan Ladd was over there, but I set the budgets so low that they'd approve and I'd deliver the film. They would have no say in it, which is the kind of arrangement I liked.
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I've had it-the agencies, the winking, the networks, the ratings. Anyone who thinks TV is an art medium is crazy-it's an advertising medium.
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[M*A*S*H] didn't get released by FOX, it escaped.
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I like audiences to crane their necks.
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Why should I keep doing things that I've done before?
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Making a movie is like chipping away at a stone. You take a piece off here, you take a piece off there and when you're finished, you have a sculpture. You know that there's something in there, but you're not sure exactly what it is until you find it.
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I love fishing. You put that line in the water and you don't know what's on the other end. Your imagination is under there.
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Happy endings are absolutely ludicrous, they're not true at all. We see the guy carry the girl across the threshold and everybody lives happily ever after -- that's bullshit. Three weeks later he's beating her up and she's suing for divorce and he's got cancer.
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We make too much of the good and too much of the bad.
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I was a heavy drinker, but the alcohol affected my heart rather than my liver. So I stopped. I smoke grass now. I say that to everybody, because marijuana should be legalized. It's ridiculous that it isn't. If at the end of the day I feel like smoking a joint I do it. It changes the perception of what I've been through all day.
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Most of my films I call arena films. I deal with a confined area -- an arena -- and I try to cover every aspect of it.
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I want to see something that I've never seen before, so how can I tell that actor what that is? I'm not trying to construct a document or situation that is what I want, because what I want is something new to me.
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