Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Every screenwriter worthy of the name has already directed his film when he has written his script.

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz

All playwrights should be dead for three hundred years.

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz

[Writers are] the highest paid secretaries in the world.

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz

So many people know me. I wish I did. I wish someone would tell me about me.

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Funny business, a woman's career: the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget…

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Please don't look at me as if you had a source of income other than your salary.

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz

There's nothing as real as money.

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz

There is no such thing as realistic dialogue. If you [simply recorded] the real conversation of any people and played it back…

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz

The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz

I got a job at Metro and went in to see Louis Mayer, who told me he wanted me to be a…

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz

I am a critic - as essential to the theatre as ants to a picnic.

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz

I've been in on the beginning, the rise, peak, collapse and end of the talking picture.

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz

“Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke.”

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz

I'm not biting my fingernails. I'm biting my knuckles. I finished the fingernails months ago.

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz

And Kate Hepburn-God, she's beautiful, God, she plays golf well, God, she can get anyone in the world on the phone, God,…

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz

I'm a schoolteacher. That's even worse than being an intellectual. Schoolteachers are not only comic, they're often cold and hungry in this…

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz

In my last two years in high school, my face was pocked with pimples, I stammered when I spoke; if I made…

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz

“Cleopatra: I will not have love as my master. Marc Anthony: Then you will not have love. - from the 1963 disaster…

— Joseph L. Mankiewicz