Today we say all art is political. But I'd say all art has to do with ethics. Which after all really comes to the same thing. It's a matter of attitudes.

I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality.

No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.

Here, in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity.

Old age is like climbing a mountain. You climb from ledge to ledge. The higher you get, the more tired and breathless you become, but your views become more extensive.

Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise.

We make each other alive; it doesn’t make a difference if it hurts.

Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.

My basic view of things is - not to have any basic view of things. From having been exceedingly dogmatic, my views on life have gradually dissolved. They don't exist any longer.

There is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect.

There's always a tension in me between my urge to destroy and my will to live... Every morning I wake up with a new wrath, a new suspiciousness, a new desire to live.

Two wrongs never add up to a right. But it's okay, I always sucked at maths.

But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.

Other than the promise of life after death, nothing consoles the poor better than the fact that rich people are also subject to death.

Things happen to us in unpredictable ways, but the effect that that has on the kind of people who we become actually is not only open to chance - we can influence it in pretty profound ways.

you see, we live in a cold climate and are not permitted to kiss on the street so I made up a song that wasn't true. I made up a song called Marriage.

It is not by delusion, however exalted, that mankind can prosper, but only by unswerving courage in the pursuit of truth.

While we measure our own success in terms of our personal comfort and security, the universe measures our success by how much we have learned.

How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species

The architect Borromini's Quattro Fontane, a little church in Rome, is one of the most beautiful rooms in history.

It is always more easy to discover and proclaim general principles than it is to apply them.