We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.

The forest of Compiegne. Look at it. Like a kind grandmother dozing in her rocking chair. Old trees practicing curtsies in the wind because they still think Louis XIV is king.

The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.

The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.

One's too many and a hundred's not enough.

A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.

An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius.