If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.

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.

Ignore people who say you can't do it, even if this person is yourself.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like all-embracing compassion.

The world order which we seek is the co-operation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.

Wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized protected robbery.

I don't like to say mean things about people's hard work.

Keep out of this," Lucian said. "I'm not smiting anybody." "You're showing mercy." Catch-a-Tick nodded. "That's heroic, too. But not as good as smiting.

The show is not a history lesson or intellectual exploration. It is entertainment based on tension, irony and storytelling that is closely related to today’s life.

It's impossible that we're alone in the universe. Every time we think we're more special than others, we're proven wrong.