Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.

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.

All good art is political. Between the lines of every book, the author implants messages for the unsuspecting reader. If not, what point does it serve?

GEN: What you are doesn’t matter to me. Who you are does.

I always thought of Levittown as a joke.

Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees.

Playing 'bop' is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.

If you do not worship God, you worship something, and nine times out of ten it will be yourself.

The best thing you can give someone is the freedom to make their own mind up - and then, if it's not working out 5 years later, you can give your opinion.

I had hoped you would protest, but please don't argue.

We need to return to the simplicity that God is love.

It is the triumph of superior reason to live with folks who don't have any.