It seems so tragic to me that so many filmmakers are making movies up against this extra-ordinary revolution with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs.

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.

It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.

Practically every guy is the perfect guy the first night, so why ever bother with a second?

No person knows your body better than you. The world's most sophisticated and sensitive diagnostic apparatus is your own body's feelings.

Golly,' said Edmund under his breath, 'He's a retired star.

I love the trick of painting. You can have the movement within the still thing, but it is completely fixed. And that illusion is constantly exciting.

The horse thinks one thing and he that rides him another

When a woman gives birth, two are born: a baby from the womb of its mother and a woman from the womb of her former existence.

Republicans are being loyal to their donors. They're being loyal to the paymasters, if you will. And it's squandering an opportunity.

I gave him a compliment! All right, I told him he probably would've made, like, a really expensive slave in the, like, in the olden-timey days.