I still would like you to feel the enthusiasm that all those people felt in the twenties and thirties, that indeed we had discovered, with cinema, the great 20th-century, all-embracing medium.

I've always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you've been, where you are, and where you're going -- in a sense it's three tenses in one.

I have always had severe problems with Austrians. ... Musical, churchy, uptight... nice legs... hypocritical... authoritarian... always insist their dustbins are very clean.

I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.

I really, sincerely believe that one should trust the work, and not the author.

You can play lacrosse all over the world provided you know where the goalposts are.

I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.

Works of art are never finished, just stopped.

Every historian has a vested interest. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was not about the Roman but the British empire. What price the truth?

I always think that art is one of the most wonderful exciting curious ways to learn. I have no worries or apologies about art being used as a teaching medium.

Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure.

Happiness doesn't come from doing what we like to do but from liking what we have to do.

A certain amount of danger is essential to the quality of life.

I think people have surgery for psychological reasons more than because of their looks.

That we do not comprehend or accept something does not invalidate its truth.

Yeah, because when you’re attracted to someone, you actually enjoy kissing them and afterward, you don’t act like you kissed Adolf Hitler.

I have three dads: my biological father, God and Bob Dylan.

What’s the opposite of déjà vu, when you see something that hasn’t happened yet?” “I don’t know—avant verrais?

A bridge is a meeting place . . . a possibility, a metaphor.

What will happen will happen, what won't happen won't happen.

Genuine art and business are the ultimate partnership toward catalyzing social evolution and well-being.