It serves the purpose of not serving a purpose, surely quite a valid one.

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.

I thought of Shelley in the hospital, how she said sometimes sadness only looked like anger and judgment. Maybe fear did too.

If a man hears much that a woman says she is not beautiful.

Looking younger and being younger is the adolescence idea.

A boy on joining wants to begin Scouting right away.

Nothing could be closer than the present, yet nothing slips away faster.

I've had some wonderful times at the White House. I've been with Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush.

Football, basketball, and the Olympic sports all have their problems with banned substances.

Our biggest moral debt is to the environment. Take-take-take, nothing given back.

Nabokov quote: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

Twice a week I would receive injections or IV's of Factor VIII which clotted the blood and then broke it down.