That comes from most people having an American film model in their heads which is nothing but a total illusionary masturbatory massage.

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.

book variables, student variables, and school variables.

Once upon a time, you dragged a part of me into the world of the dead, and now Naoko has dragged another pat of me into that world.

All we can do is find the courage to stand still and to look backwards.

He could not die when trees were green, for he loved the time too well.

Nothing serves life and soundness of body so well, nor is so necessary as the smoke of the royal plant, tobacco.

The world exists to let Man philosophize.

Being a New Yorker is never having to say you are sorry.

They who sow courtesy reap friendship, and they who plant kindness gather love.

I'm more prone to anarchy than I am to control - even though I'm a film director.

A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient.