There's more religion in my little finger than there is in the pope. But no, I don't believe in God. I am an athiest. A Darwinian evolutionist.

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.

The hearts and thoughts are the sacred springs of life.

On bad days you wonder, ‘Why not just back off from the war and lead a quiet metalife?

Recruiting is the one thing I hate. I won't do it unless my coaches tell me I've just got to. The whole process is kind of undignified for me and the young man.

I got my heroes secondhand, from television and movies, to a certain extent.

I only wear the latest thing. It's my job.

When you trust and have elevated personnel in each department then the sky really is the limit.

All places are filled with fools. [Lat., Stultorum plenea sunt omnia.]

It's a good time to be making movies, despite the cynicism people have about Hollywood.

We have to give ourselves a constitution which marks the birth of Europe as a political entity.

Never judge someone By the way he looks Or a book by the way it's covered; For inside those tattered pages, There's a lot to be discovered