There is visual illiteracy with text-oriented films like bloody 'Harry Potter' and 'Lord of the Rings.'.

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.

One of the greatest gifts from God is the eternal perspective. It is a level of fearlessness, a level of understanding where one can experience even emotional harmony with God.

It's as if a child with a brush and too much enthusiasm has been set free with a tin of black paint inside me.

Only your mind can produce fear.

Sports is like a war without the killing.

Kindly words do not enter so deeply into men as a reputation for kindness.

Inner seeing has nothing to do with physical vision; it's the perception of life directly.

No mother who stands upon low ground herself can hope to place her children upon a loftier plane. They may reach it, but it will not be through her.

I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmothers since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.

I hate being so emotionally slutty. I need to stop loving everyone I have a long conversation with.

I cannot read a fortune cookie without breaking down and crying. I am sensitive.