Abraham Polonsky quotes:

A holiday is when you celebrate something that's all finished up, that happened a long time ago and now there's nothing left to celebrate but the dead.

I'll give you my answer calmly and sensibly, my final answer. My final answer is finally no. The answer is no! Absolutely and finally no! Finally and positively no! No! No! No! N - O!

Twenty years ago I wanted to move to a nice place so our Charley would grow up a nice boy and learn a profession. But instead we live in a jungle, so he can only be a wild animal. D'you think I picked the East Side like Columbus picked America?

This is Wall Street, and today is important. Because tomorrow, July 4th, I intended to make my first million dollars--an excitingday in a man's life. The enterprise was slightly illegal.

What are you gonna do? Kill me? Everybody dies.

I'll kill you with my own hands rather than let you put the mark of Cain on my brother!

You must never throw away things that are worth good money.

Money has no moral opinions.

Indians don't last in prison. They weren't born for it like the whites.

Today in Germany, everyone is being watched--even the watchers.

A man could spend the rest of his life trying to remember what he shouldn't have said.

Directors are like generals, political dictators, aggressive people...And everyone in the film is always grateful if you can tell them what to do.

Do you know what it's like to love and be alone?

First of all, directing is an idea that you have of a total flow of images that are going on, which are incidentally actors, words, and objects in space. It's an idea you have of yourself, like the idea you have of your own personality which finds its best representation in the world in terms of specific flows of imaginary images. That's what directing is.

I want to be a fighter. So fight for something! Not for money.

It's perversion. Don't you see what it is? It's not natural. To go to great expense for something you want, that's natural. To reach out to take it, that's human, that's natural. But to get your pleasure from not taking, from cheating yourself deliberately like my brother did today, from not getting, from not taking. Don't you see what a black thing that is for a man to do? How it is to hate yourself?

I don't take no dive for nobody. Whaddya think I am, a tanker!

Kids win this'n'that every day. Thousands of them. One out of a hundred fights professionally. One out of a thousand's worth watchin', one out of a million's worth coffee and doughnuts.

What do you mean "gangsters"? It's business.

A holiday is when you celebrate something that's all finished up...

If you don't get killed, it's a lucky day for anybody.