Quotes

[on being rejected for military service due to asthma]: "I'm a very efficient director - it's my training in military tactics. I've trained my whole life to be a general but I never could. So I became the next best thing, a movie director."

[on the violence in Conan the Barbarian (1982) being rather essential]: "It's not that violent, although I was happy not to get an X rating. But if you said 'Conan the Barbarian' was rated PG, people would feel cheated. We weren't making 'Conan's Divorce', you know."

I love the bomb. It's sort of a religious totem to me. Like the plague in the Middle Ages, it's the hand of God coming out indiscriminantly to snatch you.

If there hadn't been an Arnold around for Conan, we would have had to create him". -Muscle & Fitness magazine, July 1982

I try to maintain a certain innocence toward my material. I like to say that I do what I do because I like it and that it's not preachy. When I try to put my finger on what I have to say, it's very vague. It's just an attitude. As Herman Melville put it in "Moby Dick": 'a free and easy desperado geniality.' That's my attitude. Melville was talking about men rowing into the mouth of a whale with their backs to it. I suppose that's what life is like.

I was watching Rush Limbaugh the other night, and I was horrified. I would have Rush Limbaugh drawn and quartered. He was sticking up for these Wall Street pigs. There should be public show trials, mass denunciations and executions.

[on Mexican drug traffickers] We need to go down there, kill them all, flatten the place with bulldozers so when you wake up in the morning, there's nothing there. I do believe if you have a military, you use it.

[on the "Do I feel lucky?" speech in Dirty Harry (1971)] I have a .44 Magnum, I love the .44 Magnum, in fact I still have the .44 Magnum that inspired that that line. The Second Amendment becomes more important every day.

I've led a whole life behind enemy lines. I've been the victim of so much persecution. I'm the barbarian of Hollywood.

Everything has style, everything's a bit larger than life and done with mischief. That's the way Conan is.

[on Conan the Barbarian (1982)] A feverish dream on acid.

You know, in fact, I am not a fascist. I am a total man of the people. They are the fascists [Hollywood critics]. They're creating the fascist society. I am much closer to a Maoist. However, I am a Zen anarchist. --In an interview with Ken Plume on ign.com

Luxuries and comforts are evil for humans.

[1982 interview] I love Apocalypse Now (1979)... That one movie justifies my career. I feel I really did something worthwhile by writing it. Even though I share credit (with Coppola) and I didn't direct it, it's a real piece of me.

[1982 interview] Whatever I say sounds okay when I say it, but when it's printed, it's awful. I end up being this terrible guy that has guns and likes to shoot hippies. They always take the humor out of what I say. 'Milius in Jack Boots and Leather Coat Says Facism Is On the Rise!', that kind of thing, or 'Para-Military Group Led By Director!'

[1982 interview] I will always be disliked by the Eastern critical establishment,

[In a 1982 interview] It's important to go out and do something in your life, to do something with tremendous commitment and dedication. Maybe put your life on he line to do it. It's important. It makes you a bigger person. We've gotten away from this. The pursuit of excellence - that's really one of the values I try to get into all the movies I do... It's all summed up so well in a surfer term - 'GGo for it!"

I consider The Wind and the Lion (1975) my first real movie. I approached it as a David Lean film, to do it in that style, a large epic canvas, to see id I could pull off great movements of troops. The story is even written that way. Two guys, the Rasuli and Teddy Roosevelt, yelling at each other across oceans.

[on Dillinger (1973)] I got very expensive as a writer, so I was able to make a deal with AIP, who'd have never been able to buy one of my scripts. I said I'll write whatever you want if I can direct it. I'd have paid them to direct. I looked at the gangsters of the time, and the one that had the most appeal was Dillinger. It was a subject I never would have chosen myself, but it allowed me to show how good I could do a gunfight, make the stuff cut together, make the story hold up, and make the actors act... I like it (the violence) because it's real. There are consequences in "Dillinger." You rob a bank, people are going to start shooting, and people are going to get hurt and shot. They run over a woman leaving the bank because that's what they did. They wee desperate. But you don't dwell on it. You don't dwell on the bullet hole and blood pulsing out.

A lot happens in old movies. Ideas were communicated. Ford's The Searchers (1956), for example. Sure, it's a story about a guy searching for his niece, but it's also a movie about the family. It's a movie about pioneering and what it is to be a pioneer, what it is to put yourself out on a limb. It's a movie about doing your job.

[on Francis Ford Coppola] Francis is the best of us all. He has the most talent and the most daring. There are a lot of faults in Francis, but I think he's the leader.