I don't believe in the deplorable notion of realism in the cinema: you can over-reach it, and it becomes as false as convention.

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.

Grace is the power of God.

I could not break records

The impossibility and hypocrisy of a situation where kids are expected to be honest but are judged and alienated from their community because of it should not escape us.

The landscape of my childhood was one of fierce occupation by trees.

Filming is like a long air journey: there's so much hanging around and boredom that they keep giving you food.

Comedy to me is all about the bumps and bruises and weird tics.

I need ten thousand angels to walk me out the door.

During my grief, I realised there was nothing I could do for my mother, but I did have a child.

I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.