I brought Yoko Ono to New York and gave her her first job there. I was editing a magazine called Film Culture.

For an artist, to be normal is a disaster

In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.

My films are the celebration of reality, of life, of my friends, of actual daily life that passes and is gone tomorrow. We don't pay attention to it when it happens.

An adventurer can always return home; an exile cannot. So I decided that my home would be culture.

In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don’t care about my cinema. In Europe they don’t know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!

In a meadow full of flowers you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry of life.

The deeper I went into culture, the more confused I got. So I needed something more real. I said, "Okay, from now on, my country will be cinema."

The nature of the video camera really makes you focus on the present. Since I have always been a diarist filmmaker, not one who stages scenes with actors, it has always been about the present moment.

Seek the insignificant small but essential qualities, essential to life

I'm not an abstract artist; I leave that to others. To me, abstract art ended with Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square.' To continue it is senseless.

Unraveling life lessons from just the past few years would take many more years. Lessons unlearned would pass with me, when I went through that door, to be completed in some future lifetime.

Truth is neither joyful nor sad, neither good nor bad. It is simply truth.

It is highly impossible for you to be successful at what you don’t love. Do what you love and love what you do.

There are always pressures on decision-makers other than just what is right or what is wrong.

Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.

They got the guns But we got the numbers.

Those beings only are fit for solitude who are like nobody, and are liked by nobody.

In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk - they are all part of the curriculum.

I went with Lionel Hampton for three years. Out of that came a trip to Europe.

Isn't the best defense always a good attack?