Till now I have never shot a scene without taking account of what stands behind the actors because the relationship between people and their surroundings is of prime importance.

When I am shooting a film I never think of how I want to shoot something; I simply shoot it.

A film that can be described in words is not really a film.

A man who renounces something is also a man who believes in something.

A scene has to have a rhythm of its own, a structure of its own.

Often to understand, we have to look into emptiness.

You know what I would like to do: make a film with actors standing in empty space so that the spectator would have to imagine the background of the characters.

A film you can explain in words is not a real film.

The greatest danger for those working in the cinema is the extraordinary possibility it offers for lying.

My work is like digging, it's archaeological research among the arid materials of our times. That's how I understand my first films, and that's what I'm still doing...

Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.

I learned very early that our health is always impaired by some excess either of food or abstinence, and I never had any physician except myself.

It often looks like an actor's had a big break out of nowhere, but in reality, they've been working their way up, little by little, for a while.

Honestly, I love stealing things.

When I was little in Spokane, Washington I drew all the time... and my father would bring paper home... and I mostly drew browning automatic water-cooled sub-machine guns... that was my favorite.

When our vices desert us, we flatter ourselves that we are deserting our vices.

In vain doth valour bleed, While Avarice and Rapine share the land.

Maybe I should sit. Plenty of people use sitting as a way to pass the time.

I've got splinters in my nose from the best publishing doors in town.

Now you wear your skin like iron

My Tris should look pale and small--she is pale and small, after all--but instead the room is full of her.