The script is simply a series of notes for the film.

When I am shooting a film I never think of how I want to shoot something; I simply shoot it.

A film that can be described in words is not really a film.

A man who renounces something is also a man who believes in something.

A scene has to have a rhythm of its own, a structure of its own.

Often to understand, we have to look into emptiness.

You know what I would like to do: make a film with actors standing in empty space so that the spectator would have to imagine the background of the characters.

A film you can explain in words is not a real film.

The greatest danger for those working in the cinema is the extraordinary possibility it offers for lying.

My work is like digging, it's archaeological research among the arid materials of our times. That's how I understand my first films, and that's what I'm still doing...

Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.

If the intent is right, why waste time thinking about the consequences.

Instead he was grabbing at whatever was available in this system that no longer held the old predictable relationship between effort and result as true

There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil - a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.

The only thing nicer than a phone that didn't ring all the time (or indeed at all) was six phones that didn't ring all the time (or indeed at all).

Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, schools are feeding our prisons.

Warning: fortune cookies don't care what happens to you.

Folk who don't know why America is the Land of Promise should be here during an election campaign.

Self-emptiness prepares us for spiritual fullness.

My duty is to obey orders.

Rejection never feels good, but it certainly hurts less when we are not needing something from the person who is rejecting us.