It's precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting.

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.

A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it.

Do you count your birthdays with gratitude?

Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.

We are all blessed ones. Heaven is no longer in the clouds. It is right here, all around us, everywhere; we must only open our eyes to see it.

But in another, I think a woman's going to go into a shop to find a coat or a jacket and I just don't think she's not going to go into a shop because of a bad review she probably didn't even read.

There's no doubt that the ready availability of music online has created a thousand more opportunities than it's destroyed.

Tis ill talking of halters in the house of a man that was hanged.

We have a vow to give wholeheartedly everything to the poor.

I like it [Rotterdam] much better than Amsterdam which is too much like a postcard. It's too cute for me. Rotterdam is more real, it's got a stomach.

There always exists an absolute norm to be preserved