The range of human skin colours is quite narrow when you think about it - and I do - and subtle - beige, pink, white, tan, taup.

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.

Only with absolute fearlessness can we slay the dragons of mediocrity that invade our gardens.

I'm very gullible when it comes to my own words. I believe everything I say, though I know I am a liar.

First we eat, then we do everything else.

No man is considered just and virtuous who does not know whence he came and wither he is going. – Napoleon

After all, it's the future of business communication that we're looking toward.

I'm usually sort of ambiguous in terms of whether I'm playing a good person or a bad person. I can walk that line of funny but also dark, and I'm happy doing that.

One has not understood until one has forgotten it.

I buy thousands of books a year.

Never underestimate a child's ability to get into more trouble.

My life and his were twisted into a single strand. Cut one, and you cut both. If he were gone, I would not be able to live through that. If I were gone, he wouldn't live through it, either.