Mike Nichols Quotes & Sayings

“My first memory in the world is my gym teacher ripping my mother's necklace off her neck and throwing it out the window and her running downstairs to go after it. I have no memory before that. I was 4. My father had a lot of girlfriends and my mother had a lot of boyfriends.”

“There's nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you're meant to do. It's like falling in love.”

“The only safe thing is to take a chance.”

“I was standing right behind Marilyn, completely invisible, when she sang 'Happy birthday, Mr. President.' And indeed, the corny thing happened: Her dress split for my benefit, and there was Marilyn, and yes, indeed, she didn't wear any underwear.”

“I keep coming back to it, over and over - adultery and cheating. It's the most interesting problem in the theater. How else do you get Oedipus? That's the first cheating in the theater.”

“Being with an insanely jealous person is like being in the room with a dead mammoth.”

“That seems to me the great American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.”

“I've learned that many of the worst things lead to the best things, that no great thing is achieved without a couple of bad, bad things on the way to them, and that the bad things that happen to you bring, in some cases, the good things.”

“There's nothing in the American dream about character. It's a serious flaw.”

“Nerves provide me with energy... It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that's when I get worried.”