Hollywood’s Favorite Movie Quotes: 10 Love Lines (2024)

• "Love means never having to say you're sorry."

  

  One of the most parodied movie lines in cinema — even Ryan O’Neal himself poked fun at it in Peter Bogdanovich's screwball comedy What's Up, Doc?. When Barbra Streisand quotes it, he retorts, "That's the dumbest thing I have ever heard."

• "When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."

  

  Writer Nora Ephron’s first draft didn’t have Sally and Harry ending up together because she considered a breakup to be a more realistic ending. So when it came time to film the revised happy ending, Billy Crystal ad-libbed much of his dialogue with Meg Ryan, including this most remembered line of the picture.

• "You complete me."

  

  "It was one of those lines that came so easily, it felt almost too easy," remembers writer-director Cameron Crowe. "When I first gave the script to Tom Cruise, and we were reading through it, I said, 'I'm going to change that line.' He said, 'Uh, I love that line. Why don't you give me a crack at it.' I left it in, and on the night of filming — it was 4 a.m., on a Friday, and everybody was dropping from exhaustion — Tom says the line. By the end of his speech, everybody was in tears. Across the room, Renee was a wreck. Tom had delivered the line so powerfully, and so directly to her, she was still getting over it. Later he told me, 'I had always wanted to say 'I love you' like that in a movie.'"

• "You make me want to be a better man."

  

  Though Jack Nicholson worried that his character was so unlikeable people would flee theaters, he ended up winning an Oscar for it, along with co-star Helen Hunt.

• "I wish I knew how to quit you."

  

  Screenwriter Diana Ossana got this gem directly from the New Yorker short story that inspired the film, co-written by Larry McMurtry. "The film has become a part of the popular culture," says Ossana. "We have a Google Alert for the film, and in the 10 years since it came out there hasn't been a day that there wasn't something, somewhere in the news about Brokeback Mountain."

• "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow."

  

  The racy double entendre wasn’t penned by the credited screenwriters — that’d be Jules Furthman and William Faulkner — but by producer Howard Hawks, who came up with the line at Lauren Bacall’s test screening. She was so good at it, Hawks asked Faulkner to pencil it into the shooting script.

• "I'm also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her."

  

  No surprise that one of the ultimate rom-com lines of all time also had the biggest disparity between male and female voters. Women had it at No. 28. Men just No. 100.

• "We'll always have Paris."

  

  In an oral history for the Writers Guild, screenwriter Julius Epstein recalled, "I wrote a note to [producer] Hal Wallis telling him how terrible [the script for Casablanca] was. He put it in a drawer. Thereafter, any time we had an argument about anything, he would open the drawer, pull out that note and hand it to [me] to read."

• "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

  

  Casablanca has the most quotes in the top 100. In addition to this one there are Casablanca lines at Nos. 2, 15, 16 and 52.

• "Here's looking at you, kid."

  

  The Japanese version of the line — "Kimi no hitomi ni kanpai'' — literally translates as, "Cheers to your eyes."Manako Ihaya of the American Translators Association calls it "a classic example of a good movie script translation" for its ability to capture the nuance of the English for the Japanese audience.

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