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

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.

Most cinema is not about images but text. Why on earth have we based cinema on text? Why can't we break that umbilical cord? Why do we have to pollute cinema?

You must fight to invest your time into producing products and added value to your generation.

Writers need faith, or else we can never trust the action of our words!

Learning to treat ourselves lovingly may at first feel like a dangerous experiment.

I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn't matter.

People are so confused about race and hip-hop that people didn't even consider the Beastie Boys one of the greatest rap groups of all time because they were white.

I have no time to explain now. It is a thrilling tale, I wish to do it justice.

Belief, in one of its accepted senses, may consist in a merely intellectual assent, while faith implies such confidence and conviction as will impel to action.

Nothing that can be known has existence in itself. It depends on a knower. The knower is consciousness.

Unless this love is among us, we can kill ourselves with work and it will only be work, not love. Work without love is slavery.

A man who tells you to follow him, will turn his followers into his company. While a true leader who does not tell you to follow him, will sit in the company of his followers.