Documentaries deal with people who live real, everyday lives. But if these people trusted us and told us the truth about their lives, it could be used against them - which sometimes happened.

For me optimism is two lovers walking into the sunset arm in arm. Or maybe into the sunrise - whatever appeals to you.

I believe the life of every person is worthy of scrutiny, containing its own secrets and dramas.

I have one good characteristic: I'm a pessimist, so I always imagine the worst - always. To me, the future is a black hole.

Maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.

There are mysteries, secret zones in each individual.

In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.

This man (Bergman) is one of the few film directors-perhaps the only one in the world-to have said as much about human nature as Dostoevsky or Camus.

Do people really want liberty, equality, fraternity? Is it not some manner of speaking?

I like chance meetings - life is full of them. Every day, without realising it, I pass people whom I should know.

The realm of superstitions, fortune-telling, presentiments, intuition, dreams, all this is the inner life of a human being, and all this is the hardest thing to film.

If we put aside the practicality, we may find our wishes to be very innocent.

Memory is a crazy woman who hoards colored rags and throws away food.

Ambition has to be joined with expectancy. A sense that you have a dream for yourself that you believe can happen.

Upward, not Northward

You attract what you need like a lover

It doesn't matter whether we live in the 19th or 21st centuries; we face the same basic problems that everyone who lives between the Fall and the return of Christ faces.

We cannot afford four more years of this misguided socialist policies from President Obama and his administration.

I look upon this as I did upon the Dictionary: it is all work, and my inducement to it is not love or desire of fame, but the want of money, which is the only motive to writing that I know of.

Nothing infuriates an academic more than a talented and successful colleague.

Allah does not withhold to withhold. Remaking the heart was the objective. To remake it, He sometimes breaks it first.