Place means nothing to me. I can be at home anywhere.

For an artist, to be normal is a disaster

In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.

My films are the celebration of reality, of life, of my friends, of actual daily life that passes and is gone tomorrow. We don't pay attention to it when it happens.

An adventurer can always return home; an exile cannot. So I decided that my home would be culture.

In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don’t care about my cinema. In Europe they don’t know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!

In a meadow full of flowers you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry of life.

The deeper I went into culture, the more confused I got. So I needed something more real. I said, "Okay, from now on, my country will be cinema."

The nature of the video camera really makes you focus on the present. Since I have always been a diarist filmmaker, not one who stages scenes with actors, it has always been about the present moment.

Seek the insignificant small but essential qualities, essential to life

I'm not an abstract artist; I leave that to others. To me, abstract art ended with Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square.' To continue it is senseless.

On a visit or vacation to Toba Lake, you may say 'Horas' to Batak people, when we meet, visit and shake hands.

Why don't we just buy one airplane and let the pilots take turns flying it.

When there's a shadow, you follow the sun. When there is love, then you look for the one. And for the promises, there is the sky. And for the heavens are those who can fly.

Small steps to the madhouse still get us there at last

Manual labor to my father was not only good and decent for it's own sake but, as he was given to saying, it straightened out one's thoughts.

Let me remind you all that the first task of American foreign policy is to reduce threats to the United States.

The thing we've learned from the last 20 years of counterterrorism is the significant value you get from removing leadership from the battlefield in degrading the organization.

On Michael Moore TV show, when he went to the home of the guy who invented the car alarm and set off all the car alarms on the block... pretty funny.

He was silent for a moment, staring out the window into the rain; I imagined he was contemplating the fact that his family's presence was turning the locals into giant dogs.

True prayer is asking God what He wants.