Top 119 Quotes & Sayings by Edward Zwick

Like everyone, I was a kid who played chess when I was young. And I am admittedly old enough to have been around during the fervor of the match in Reykjavik and the rise of Bobby Fischer, so those two things conspired to pique my interest.

The issue of assault in the military is something that they've gone to great lengths to try to deal with - and have not entirely dealt with yet.

I don't think movies can ever be too intense, but people have to understand why you're showing them the things you are showing them.

In my experience of the men of action I have met - whether from the Second World War or Iraq or Vietnam - they often had to do things that they would rather not reflect upon afterwards. This is perhaps one reason why the story of the Bielskis remained untold for so long.

I, for one, suffer from a little bit of superhero fatigue.

Forgive me, but what is the purpose of drama but catharsis?

Every day and every scene, it's never the scene that you expect.

There is something universal in the theme of a man trying to save his family in the midst of the most terrible circumstances. It is not limited to Sierra Leone. This story could apply to any number of places where ordinary people have been caught up in political events beyond their control.

I might have painted myself into a bit of a corner doing all these big, serious David Lean-esque movies.

People, especially press, want to pigeonhole you.

The idea that things can be serious minded but must be somehow balkanized in the art-house ghetto is very upsetting because I think it limits not just the audience who was already going to see it, but those who might have had their tastes developed at a younger age.

The phone that you carry around with you. It's not just that it's a locator for anybody who wants to actually find out where you are, but it's also a leash. It's a reminder just how tethered you are.

I tend not to go look at movies before I make a movie. I'd rather not be specifically influenced.

The issue of diamonds in Africa is inseparable from the issue of child soldiers.

I know that when I'm writing, I always want to be directing.

There is no reason why challenging themes and engaging stories have to be mutually exclusive - in fact, each can fuel the other. As a filmmaker, I want to entertain people first and foremost. If out of that comes a greater awareness and understanding of a time or a circumstance, then the hope is that change can happen.

I think that I am interested in the resonance between character drama and high stakes, either situational or political or social or other kind of elevated drama, and I tend to find that those things combust.

My very first job was working on a TV show that was a prestigious TV show and well done - was called 'Family.'

'Milk' doesn't imply that all gay men who stayed in the closet were cowards.

I think one of the privileges of being a filmmaker is the opportunity to remain a kind of perpetual student.

Sometimes when an actor and director work together for the first time, it's not as if there's a suspicion, but there is tentativeness, a certain amount of a right of passage you have to go through in order to get there. When it's already there from the beginning, it's such a plus.

It's a harder time to make original, less conventional movies. But God, we need them!

Sometimes when we weep in the movies we weep for ourselves or for a life unlived. Or we even go to the movies because we want to resist the emotion that's there in front of us. I think there is always a catharsis that I look for and that makes the movie experience worthwhile.

There's a great tradition of actors taking on parts of much less obvious sympathy.

If a director is really a director, I think he's interested in more than one thing.

I look at modern life and I see people not taking responsibility for their lives. The temptation to blame, to find external causes to one's own issues is something that is particularly modern. I know that personally I find that sense of responsibility interesting.

If you don't know each other you spend time doing research together, having dinner, and talking about your lives. You try to find common ground. Once you're shooting, the pressures are so intense; you really want to have a channel of communication open to you already.

There is a segment of the American population that has been excluded from the national myth, and that should be redressed.

Samurai culture did exist really, for hundreds of years and the notion of people trying to create some sort of a moral code, the idea that there existed certain behaviors that could be celebrated and that could be operative in a life.

Yes, illness is serious, but the indignities are also funny. And that defines my world view.

To me this movie is about what is valuable. To one person it might be a stone; to someone else, a story in a magazine; to another, it is a child. The juxtaposition of one man obsessed with finding a valuable diamond with another man risking his life to find his son is the beating heart of this film.

The military has been actually remarkable at dealing with race, but gender is an issue.

I'm always interested in the ways in which a character can inhabit either a theme or a premise personally, so that those scenes that are about his character or his relationship with other characters feel in context and don't seem to be apart from or oddly vestigial to the actual drama.

The funny thing is, when you look at photos of Tuvia Bielski, he was fair, blue-eyed, and could pass for a Gentile.

When I first thought about the military - and this goes all the way back to 'Glory' - I learned really quickly that it isn't a monolith. It is really an institution made up of some people with very different personalities and people of different backgrounds.

I would say that 'Schindler's List,' as powerful as it was, seemed to have continued with a particular iconography of victimization and passivity. That was the iconography with which I had grown up and to which I had grown accustomed.

I watched aspirationally. I looked at movies that maybe I didn't entirely understand but which developed in me some thirst for their subjects or for their context, and that became part of how I came to understand the world.

I do watch 'It's a Wonderful Life' with my children at Christmas, and I liked it long before it went into the public domain and became a cliche.

I was trained in the repertory theater. You would do Moliere one night and Sam Shepard the next.

When 'The Godfather' comes on, any time of the day or night, I'm lost because I'm incapable of turning it off.

When my own son was 12, we didn't want toy guns in the house. So he just picked up a stick and went, 'Bam! Bam! Bam!' That's the testosterone of a 12-year-old boy.

There is nothing that is so serious that you can't also see its comic side. Comedy is a way of talking about the most serious things.

There's a rising tide of concern among activists, economists, and artists about Africa. Theres a temptation to think of it as a monolith as opposed to all these different countries with different problems.

Those of my generation who grew up in the midst of the Cold War had a very, very strong awareness and very much were sort of influenced by the demonization of the Soviet Union, whether that was through the Cuban Missile Crisis or duck-and-cover, or any of those things that so affected us then.

There's only a certain number of movies I'm going to get made, and it's important to me that they each be original somehow.

I think it's too easy often to find a villain out of the headlines and to then repeat that villainy again and again and again. You know, traditionally, America has always looked to scapegoat someone as the boogie man.

One reason why in Hollywood we are so often inventing heroes is that real heroes are vexing.

When we did 'Thirtysomething,' television was either about doctors, lawyers, or cops.

I've always been drawn to all sorts of genres and all sorts of voices.

It seems that almost every time a valuable natural resource is discovered in the world-whether it be diamonds, rubber, gold, oil, whatever-often what results is a tragedy for the country in which they are found. Making matters worse, the resulting riches from these resources rarely benefit the people of the country from which they come.

I guess television is so much on the word. It's so much closer to playwriting - the scale is more just about the voices and the internal lives. Movies, it's a very different canvas.

I've always believed that the stories and the performances are more important than I am. I think that the more invisible that my hand is, the more attention people can pay to the story and to those performances.

I like to do everything I can to avoid rehearsals, even while we're rehearsing.

In the necessary memorialisation of the six million dead, there had been precious little attention paid to those who survived and how they survived.

I've never been one of those guys who storyboards every frame, because that would take away some of the mystery and some of the fun.

Adolescence is a time in which you experience everything more intensely.

I have nothing against diamonds, or rubies or emeralds or sapphires. I do object when their acquisition is complicit in the debasement of children or the destruction of a country.

My job is to tell the truth about what's happening as best I can.

I met a lot of women in the military with Meg Ryan, and they were remarkably impressive: Competent and strong and not versions of men, but versions of women. And they had stories to tell about how difficult it had been for them.

If you take away scale, the nature of the story changes. I made a joke the other day: if I were to try to make 'Glory' now, rather than be about a regiment, it would be about a platoon. It would be seven men in the woods rather than all the men on the beach.