You can play lacrosse all over the world provided you know where the goalposts are.

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.

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.

Most cinema is not about images but text. Why on earth have we based cinema on text? Why can't we break that umbilical cord? Why do we have to pollute cinema?

Business Plans: It's about the Process, Not the Product

1, 320 seconds walk into the room before he does.

So I was hugely thrilled that my first scene ever on camera was with Hal Holbrook.

No-one can function properly without occasional peace and quiet.

I know a lot about Jewish comedians.

She had the kind of eyes that predisposed you to supporting her every endeavor.

The Harder you work, the easier it looks

[Regarding President Obama] Yeah, yeah, yeah, I talked to him. I sorta, I guess, helped him get elected.

My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.

When it's all you, you can't blame a bear. You gotta bear the burden yourself.