Minority views expressed in films simply don't sell tickets.

I said I would do all the films about the commercials, and the films about ball-bearings and Ford tractors and so on, if once a year they gave me money for a free film.

A style is not a matter of camera angles or fancy footwork, it's an expression, an accurate expression of your particular opinion.

The British cinema had been very dull and conformist.

A big element of what they regard as conformity is simply a desire to have an audience.

I'm now beginning to feel that the pessimistic vision is not for the movies.

True, I have raped history, but it has produced some beautiful offspring.

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.

The place I live in is a kind of maze and I keep seeking the exit or the home.

Sometimes a line of mathematical research extending through decades can be thought of as one long conversation in which many mathematicians take part. This is fortunately true at present.

But anything that you hear about Japan is nothing like what you see when you actually go over there and see it, you know, in a real situation.

What is most needed for learning is a humble mind.

It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true, or the suppression of things that are true.

How marvellous it would be if, at the end of the day, each of us could say: today I have performed an act of charity towards others!

I happen to like debating, and I like to debate like a lawyer, and I can argue any points to death, and I will.

How much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable) who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of a historian.