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'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.

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.

Most cinema is not about images but text. Why on earth have we based cinema on text? Why can't we break that umbilical cord? Why do we have to pollute cinema?

Be Brave. Remember, life is a gift.

The chief purpose of life, for any of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks.

Diplomacy is the art of letting someone have your way.

To have what we want is riches but to be able to do without is power.

I'm an around-the-way girl. I'm a singer, songwriter. I'm about positivity and spreading a good message and telling the people's story.

The ideal of beauty is simplicity and tranquility.

Renunciation means absence of hankering after fruit.

You were never able to break her. She is the stone of this kingdom.

There's nothing wrong with calling a spade a spade. Some things have to be exposed.

Soon I will honor my parents by dying as they died. and if all they believed about death was true, soon I will join them in whatever comes next.