Mirrors are the essence of movies.

And later I thought, I can't think how anyone can become a director without learning the craft of cinematography.

The rules are learnt in order to be broken, but if you don't know them, then something is missing.

You make the movie through the cinematography - it sounds quite a simple idea, but it was like a huge revelation to me.

Marketing is a very good thing, but it shouldn't control everything. It should be the tool, not that which dictates.

Years ago I had a house in Sussex, it was like Arcadia, with an old Victorian bridge, a pond and the Downs.

Too many films today feel formulaic and familiar. I prefer it when the familiar is made to feel strange.

When a book is just a plot, you know, two men fight for the love of a woman in a wild frontier, I immediately ask, 'Why?'

In marketing, the familiar is everything.

What makes God laugh is people who make plans.

Any change in form produces a fear of change, and that has accelerated. Marketing is the death of invention, because marketing deals with the familiar.

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.

You're so young, you can't know the meaning of true regret. It's never what you've done, love, it's what you've left undone.

The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.

Where there is change, there is happiness

Go to bed," he ordered. "Go to bed... and stay there.

Zen is the fastest method I know of, aside from mysticism, of dissolving the fixations people have about spiritual practice and themselves.

Intellectuals would be much more accepted now than in the '40s

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.

When everything is coming your way, youre probably in the wrong lane.

Mutual forgiveness of each vice. Such are the Gates of Paradise.