In 1962, we created the Filmmakers' Co-Op because nobody wanted to distribute our films. If we had the Internet in those days, we wouldn't have needed the Co-Op.

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.

But what I knew then was that nobody-not even my mother-was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself in the surface.

What does our commitment to nonviolence mean as citizens of one of the most powerful and oppressive nations in recorded history?

Hope is a gracious expectation.

He is indeed the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart.

If you're in love it ought to make you happy. You ought to laugh.

Of all states that understands local control of schools, Iowa is such a state.

If other people are going to talk, conversation becomes impossible.

Sometimes I wanted to believe something so badly, I deliberately manufactured excuses and ignored painful reality.

I genuinely love you all and the fact that some of you are not feeling so great at the moment really really upsets me.

There is an abiding beauty which may be appreciated by those who will see things as they are and who will ask for no reward except to see.