The best painting is totally non-narrative. It doesn't have to tell you a story.

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 think we should try to be responsible and educate ourselves. I'm simply doing that and traveling, learning first hand, and seeing first hand what's going on.

I'm recording our history now on the bedroom wall, and when we leave the landlord will come and paint over it all.

I do not buy repentance at so heavy a cost as a thousand drachmae.

This is our moment, here at the cross-roads of time. Time is relentless and as the past dissappears, we're on the verge of all things new.

Fame and success are very different things.

Our challenge is not to educate the children we used to have or want to have, but to educate the children who come to the schoolhouse door.

What audiences end up with word-wise is a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romances, a movie that reeks of phoniness and lacks even minimal originality.

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.

It's so miserable and so easy to keep slamming Titanic -- I'll shut up.

A poet's first contract is with truth.