1. “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.”
2. “One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It s essential that one man make a film.”
3. “A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.”
4. “However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”
5. “I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don’t want.”
6. “Sanitised violence in movies has been accepted for years. What seems to upset everybody now is the showing of the consequences of violence.”
7. “Never say no to a idea – you never know how that idea will ignite another idea.”
8. “The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.”
9. “Nothing is as dangerous as a sure thing.”
10. “The truth of a thing is in the feel of it, not in the think of it.”
11. “All my life I’ve spoiled the things that meat the most to me.”
12. “If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.”
13. “If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.”
14. “When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.”
15. “I’m a slave to my imagination in terms of making narrative films.”
16. “A film needs more than you can give it in a lifetime.”
17. “Regret isn’t going to get me anywhere. It’s like being obsessed with something. It doesn’t bring you anywhere.”
18. “Everybody has their black moments.”
19. “Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life.”
20. “No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.”
21. “You either connect or you don’t connect. It’s not the end of the world. It’s a movie.”
22. “Critical opinion on my films has always been salvaged by what I would call subsequent critical opinion.”
23. “There are few thigs more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die.”
24. “The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale.”
25. “Don’t get obsessed with not liking a movie.”
26. “It’s a mistake to confuse pity with love.”
27. “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”
28. “Shooting a movie is the worst milieu for creative work ever devised by man.”
29. “There’s something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.”
30. “The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize or analyze it.”
