Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else.

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.

Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God.

What we decide to do in the face of adversity is perhaps the truest measure of character.

It's important for women to work. They need to keep their independence, to keep earning and being challenged.

The missing stairs baffled Clary. What did vampires have against stairs? -Clary, pg.266-

I don't smoke or drink, but I will not tell you that I won't smoke again. Probably I will when I'm 60.

For love is mor than gold or gret richesse; Gold faileth ofte; love wol abyde.

I just enjoy playing in wind, grew up in it, and it makes the golf a bit more fun.

Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.

Language is filled with words for deprivation images so familiar it is hard to crack language open into that other country the country of being.