There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

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.

If you have problems with your earthly authorities it may be probably because you have not been praying enough for your leaders

He who is ready to die for his country is a fool. For he didn’t choose where he was born

I'm not good at watching stuff that I'm in at all. I should stop. I shouldn't watch something for the first time with a room full of people at Sundance. It's not a good idea.

Adam and Eve were the first of all unions to defy management.

If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.

All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.

I like a dramatic eye and a bold lip.

I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class.

The funny thing is, people's perceptions of what a song is about is usually wrong a majority of the time. But they're still going to read what they want to into it.

In an artist's life, death is perhaps not the most difficult thing.