I don't like the way some actors, when playing a nasty character, will try to grab hold of something good about them.

In terms of popular cinema, 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' is as near perfection as I can think of.

The films that I really enjoy now are films that are made by, for wont of a better word, mavericks.

There are some people who walk into a room and they oxygenate it, by their very being there's fresh air. Then there are those who come in with the smell of death and they suck the life out.

Filmmaking is something I have to do. It's not something I particularly want to do.

You have to just go with your imagination, where your instinct takes you.

I know virtually no one of my age who can remember a hug, or a smile from their father, or a 'Let's go play football.'

A script is utterly useless in and of itself; it's only of any worth the minute your actors, your designers, your directors come into being.

Life is much weirder than fiction; nothing's more absurd.

I find the world more absurd now than I did when I was a kid.

I hate it when something is set in 1967 and every piece of furniture was made in 1967. No! If it's set in 1967, people have furniture given to them by their grandmother, which she bought in 1932!

Forever thine, forever mine.

Protecting your treasure means to give your life for it.

My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb.

Some things are meant to be and if it was, you will know it.

I have often thought upon death, and I find it the least of all evils.

The Elizabethan age might be better named the beginning of the smoking era.

Painting is the aesthetic side of the object but it has never been original, has never been its own goal.

Think of the most amazing thing you could possibly do with your life. Then say out loud, 'YES.'

Happiness? No, it's not there for me.

If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.