I'm not an abstract artist; I leave that to others. To me, abstract art ended with Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square.' To continue it is senseless.

For an artist, to be normal is a disaster

In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.

My films are the celebration of reality, of life, of my friends, of actual daily life that passes and is gone tomorrow. We don't pay attention to it when it happens.

An adventurer can always return home; an exile cannot. So I decided that my home would be culture.

In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don’t care about my cinema. In Europe they don’t know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!

In a meadow full of flowers you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry of life.

The deeper I went into culture, the more confused I got. So I needed something more real. I said, "Okay, from now on, my country will be cinema."

The nature of the video camera really makes you focus on the present. Since I have always been a diarist filmmaker, not one who stages scenes with actors, it has always been about the present moment.

Seek the insignificant small but essential qualities, essential to life

We are the measure of all things. And the beauty of our creation, of our art is proportional to the beauty of ourselves of our souls.

To be a mirror of God’s love is to show Jesus by one’s way of living

To master magical realism, one must make the real seem unreal but, more importantly, make the unreal seem real.

Even if language is a living evolving organism, we don't have to embrace all the changes that occur during our lifetimes. If language is so alive, it can get sick.

One trick I swear by: I pour a little neroli or lavender oil onto a hot towel and use it to wipe off my makeup. It opens up my pores, and then my face cream sinks in better.

And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass

I grew up with artists.

If you want to be a star, don't bother doing it because it ends up being very empty.

I keep telling my Tory colleagues: don't have any policies. A manifesto that has policies alienates people. In 1979 the manifesto said nothing which was brilliant.

What do you say when your friends come to visit and the dog starts humping their leg. Well, if it's a pit bull, you say, "You better let him finish."

But anyone can begin. It was the part with all the promise, the potential, the things I loved. More and more, though, I was finding myself wanting to find out what happened in the end.