- Elia Kazan: "On the Waterfront" was my own story. Every day I worked on that film I was telling the world where I stood and telling my critics to go and *fuck* themselves.
- Elia Kazan: I did what I did because it was the more tolerable of two painful alternatives that were both wrong for me. That's what a difficult decision means. Either way you go, you lose.
- Elia Kazan: The scene in the film where Brando goes back to the Waterfront and is rejected by the men with whom he'd worked, day after day, that was my story. I was snubbed by friends, each and every day, and I've not forgotten, nor will I forgive the men who snubbed me.
- Carl Foreman: The blacklist period was like a continuous earthquake, in the sense that almost everybody lost their footing in it, someway or the other.
- Carl Foreman: I started to do "High Noon" back in 1949 when the Un-American Activities Committee was just going into high gear in Hollywood. You could almost smell the fear that rose. It was like the smog we have now. People were falling by the wayside, one way or another... They were either capitulating to these political gangsters from out-of-town or they were being executed... I could see that my time was coming, sooner or later... It was these events that made me think of a story about Hollywood under the political gun, as it were, and its reaction to the situation. The story of an individual at odds with the community.
- Carl Foreman: It was such a cowardly thing to do: naming somebody. The idea of being a stool pigeon - the idea of being an informer - well, that, to me, was truly un-American.
- Carl Foreman: Writing the screenplay became - insane. Because, life was mirroring art and art was mirroring life. There was no difference. It was all happening at the same time.