#mitchumcomments

"... I have never mortgaged my tongue to hold a job ... I don't believe in making plans. It has been my experience that nothing I planned in advance and with what I considered intelligent care, ever panned out... I have seen too many thin slices of integrity, sincerity and competence, wrapped in cellophane and passed out as the total product, to have any confidence in fancy verbal packages ... In the last analysis, I presume that one of my least popular attributes is my inverted sense of dignity. Many of my statements have been smoke screen, designed to allow me to follow my own course without exposing it. I learned early in life that by telling a story far more colorful than the truth ... one's own truth is let alone. I like to be let alone. I know what I am: I am a patient cynic."

"I've always turned down a lot of scripts. I turned down Wild Rovers. It sounded like Blake Edwards wrote it as a compilation of old Street and Smith western magazines ... I turned down The Wild Bunch, too. What do i need out of crazy Sam Peckinpah? I was down in Durango the same time he was. I was doing Five Card Stud with Dean Martin and we lived much better. Peckinpah's company was living in tents in the desert, with reptiles and spiders and cheap whores crawling around. Who needs that? I turned down Patton, too ... They get very offended when you turn down their scripts. 'What do you mean, you don't want to do it?' they ask. 'Get somebody else,' I say. 'Who do you suggest?' What the hell do i care ..."