I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realising all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.

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.

One land also shall ask another, and say, ‘Is righteousness that makes a man righteous gone through thee?’ And it shall say, ‘No.

And then I realized you were not rebellious but courageous. You know what that means? It means being scared but doing it anyway.

Forgiveness empties the past of its power to empty the present of its peace.

I'm just glad I've had these opportunities to be geeks in some really awesome movies.

In high school, it was all about popularity, being with the boyfriend and all the girls thinking he's cute.

Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built.

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.

I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth.

Nothing is so bitter that a calm mind cannot find comfort in it.