I think it is really important to be in some way provocative -- either intellectually or viscerally -- in the films one makes.

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.

Life is not everlasting only for You and Me.

For what is faith, except a perspective on life seen through the belief that there is a purpose, there is hope, there are miracles, there is something better coming and there is a loving God.

Little deeds of kindness little words of love Help to make earth happy like the heaven above.

Christian theology: nothing so grotesque could possibly be true.

Running isn't a sport because anyone can do it. Anything we can all do can't be a sport. I can run, you can run. My mother can run, you don't see her on the cover of Sports Illustrated do you?

Mother is a synonym for abandonment and death. Comparing this synonym to water, it is like poured-out water. I call it mother, the identity that I cannot identify.

happy endings start with new beginnings.

Prayer is God's answer to our poverty, not a power we exercise to obtain an answer.

What we have to be is what we are.