It's always a good starting point to tell a story that has many layers.

We made a film about the need for silence and withdrawal... and here we are at the epicentre of noise and excitement. Life is full of surprises.

I'm a pretty chaotic person, but I'm also a perfectionist. It's a very unfortunate mix.

I usually make films about what's on my mind at any given time.

I never work from the script. I get the script more or less.

I never made films like kind of career moves, like making this film in order to make that film in order to end up in Hollywood.

The changes are part of my writing process. When I write, I imagine scenes. I write things down. I take photographs. I do some casting. I rewrite. It's a permanent making or remaking.

'Ida' is about humanity, about guilt and forgiveness. It's not a film that deals with an issue as such. It's more universal.

For me, good films and good books are irreducible to a lesson. You can't just kind of translate them into one statement. On the contrary, the more you do that, the less wisdom in art there is.

There's just as much wisdom in knowing when to keep quiet as there is in knowing when to speak up. Use your voice wisely.

A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day.

Just let go of the need to care about whether it happens or not, then you are free from fear and can then concentrate on focusing.

We all have flaws and mine is being wicked.

In the same way that when the car got going, people thought it would be an electric car, people thought it would be a steam car.

What is a harp but an oversized cheese slicer with cultural pretensions?

Every tribe needs a good front man to sell the program. Who better to convince the Middle East to give up the oil, than a brown man with a Muslim name?

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.

If you're not falling, you're not training hard enough.

You can't really protect women or men from their choices, so let them have their own lives and trust the process.