You go overseas and people are oppressed and scared and worried but we're not like that... we're more like my films and how people come out at the end of seeing them - they feel good.

Then if your movie clicks with real audiences, you'll be sucked into some sort of Hollywood orbit. It's a devil of a place where the only religion that really counts is box office.

My background was art school, documentary director and surfer with a keen interest in thrilling acts of life threatening stupidity.

Australians don't have a preconceived notion of what things have to be... we can go on a fantastic journey.

In a kind of a way there's a bit of that happening now so we have to be careful to preserve our culture.

Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts.

The American formula things are out there but they don't have any stories to tell - we have all the stories to tell - but they're all formula.

Hollywood is horrible... it's beyond satire.

Find your own specific voice in filmmaking and go for it. Either people will get it or they won't and that's what it's all about.

We cheer everyone who goes off to Hollywood and tells American stories but telling Australian stories is the greatest thing you can do.

All the jokes in my films, the comedy, they're not me, I just try to hold a big mirror up to us.

The city (of Vienna) had an unerring tradition of celebrating some of it's greatest composers after it had around them to die in poverty.

The streetlight forge speech bubbles of illumination in the air. A faint glow from the moon casts eerie shadows behind the dark clouds.

The casket was lined with lovely velvet, which must have felt lovely even to the dead, but the glowing man continued to rip up the casket.

I did it for political, moral reasons, thinking that I was making this great sacrifice, but it was absolutely necessary; I was not going to contribute to the violence in the world anymore.

A cynic sees little to admire in the world, while the world sees even less to admire in him.

Winter is the time for study, you know, and the colder it is the more studious we are.

If you are terrified of making mistakes, you will be reluctant to acknowledge them when you do make them-and therefore you will not correct them.

The man who can put himself in the place of other men, who can understand the workings of their minds, need never worry about what the future has in store for him.

It's always been colossally important to me that my books should be well received in India. It's where I come from.

They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.