A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he...

I’ve never achieved spectacular success with a film. My reputation has grown slowly. I suppose you could say that I’m a successful filmmaker-in that a number of people speak well of me. But none of...

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes

However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

I never learned anything at all in school and didn’t read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.

The dead know only one thing, it is better to be alive

I’ve got a peculiar weakness for criminals and artists-neither takes life as it is. Any tragic story has to be in conflict with things as they are.

The greatest nations have all acted like gangsters and the smallest like prostitutes.

I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest...

The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.

I don’t actually know Tom that well.

Observation is a dying art.

Any time you take a chance you better be sure the rewards are worth the risk because they can put you away just as fast for a ten dollar heist as they can for a...

It’s a mistake to confuse pity with love.

The lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they...

If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.

It’s crazy how you can get yourself in a mess sometimes and not even be able to think about it with any sense and yet not be able to think about anything else.

The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale.

You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think...

Here’s to five miserable months on the wagon and the irreparable harm that it’s caused me.

The destruction of this universe would have no significance on a cosmic scale.

There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die.

If chess has any relationship to film-making, it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.

Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.

What do you take me for? A fourteen karat sucker?

The purpose of bayonet training is to awaken your killer instincts. The killer instinct will make you strong. If the meek ever inherit the earth the strong will take it away from them. The weak...

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.

You’re an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot.

I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don’t want.