A hand cannot write on itself.

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.

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

I stand for freedom of expression, doing what you believe in, and going after your dreams.

In speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a rest before the next consonant.

No, scratch the word "career." Careers are for people who wish to advance. I only want to survive, draw a paycheck.

I have a tendency toward being a micromanager. Which, the bigger the project you're involved in, the harder that becomes.

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

The United States should help strengthen nongovernmental humanitarian agencies working in Sudan so that they can handle an increased flow of aid.

You might as well take the sun out of the sky as friendship from life: for the immortal gods have given us nothing better or more delightful.

The relations between a man and his or her god is a personal matter; you can't go out and challenge the belief of people in a superior being.

I'm a well-intentioned plotter who ends up with wondrous pantsing revelations and (at times) ginormous rewrites that look almost nothing like my carefully plotted plans.