I think my films are very English. That certain emotional distance, interest in the world, interest in irony. These are all deeply English propositions.

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.

Rise to the occassion which is life!

Dust everywhere... and out of that emerged this beautiful boy with the bluest eyes I'd ever seen, holding his hand out to help me to my feet.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus, or just a really cool Opotamus?

It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

I was not successful as a ball player, as it was a game of skill.

The upright, if he suffer calumny to move him, fears the tongue of man more than the eye of God.

All progress comes from the creative minority.

The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.