Master Precision. Be a precision instrument myself.

Cinematography is a writing with images in mouvement and with sounds.

Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle.

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.

When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes more towards the within, the eye towards the outer.

When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best - that is inspiration.

Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.

Bring together things that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.

Ten properties of an object, according to Leonardo: light and dark, color and substance, form and position, distance and nearness, movement and stillness.

To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.

The world is too brutal for me—I am glad there is such a thing as the grave—I am sure I shall never have any rest till I get there.

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.

The cheapest route to a new opportunity is conversation.

Knowing that there is one Baptism, we who hold the head and root of the One Church know for certain that to him who is outside the Church nothing is lawful.

I'm not from a lower social level, but I think I relate more to lower levels then to people who've got money.

If we wish to rebuild our cities, we must first rebuild our neighborhoods.

The political spectrum is not linear but circular. In my experience the extreme left always ends up rubbing shoulders with the extreme right. They are philosophically blood brothers.

And may the best of you - for it will only be the best of you, and even then only in the rarest and briefest moments - succeed in framing that most basic of questions, 'how do we live?'

I'm saying that she (Whitney Houston) looks great for a singer... the way Courtney Love is a singer.

The only difference between the women I've dated and Charles Manson is that Manson has the decency to look like a nut case when you first meet him.