Any film, or to me any creative endeavour, no matter who you're working with, is, in many cases, a wonderful experience.

There's no such thing as simple. Simple is hard.

You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.

Every scene is a lesson. Every shot is a school. Let the learning continue.

As a child I had terrible asthma.

More than ninety percent of directing a picture is the right casting

Now more than ever we need to talk to each other, to listen to each other and understand how we see the world, and cinema is the best medium for doing this.

I love movies - it's my whole life, and that's it.

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.

Always stay open to surprise.

I’m not interested in a realistic look, not at all, not ever. Every film should look the way I feel.

Yellow leaves hang on your tree of life. The messengers of death are waiting. You are going to travel far away. Have you any provisions for the journey?

I would hope that the staffs at juvenile detention centers and reform schools are carefully chosen so that there is a community of support and hope.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

I sit where the leaves of the maple and the gnarled and knotted gum are circling and drifting around me.

Everyone in my family is a hero to me.

Well, if you're not a man in glasses standing in front of me with a tape recorder going like this, I can't see anything. But if you are, then I see perfectly well.

You can't improve on saying nothing.

You can find Calcutta all over the world, if you have the eyes to see.

A man has got to keep his extrication. The important thing is not to get bogged down In what he has to do to earn a living.

I'm usually more concerned with how things sound than how they look on the page.