Making movies is an effort is an attempt to leave a trace of your existence.

Documentary filmmaking ruins you for real life, because you learn to be extremely attentive.

This whole business of documentary being a second-class citizen is bullshit. A documentary can be as interesting, as dramatic, as sad, as funny, blah, blah, blah, as a fiction movie. Or it can be as awful as a fiction movie!

A lot of the issues of rhythm in film are found in the editing because it's very rare that any sequence is the sequence that is shot.

Whether you're a newspaper journalist, a lawyer, a doctor. You have to organize your thoughts.

I think I've learned a lot about how to make movies, and particularly about how to edit movies by thinking about how similar problems are resolved in other forms. The issues in all forms are the same in an abstract sense, aren't they? Characterization, abstraction, metaphor, passage of time... Whether it's a movie, a novel, a play, or a poem, those issues exist. And each person resolves them differently.

One's relationship to time is complicated, and sometimes a day will drag on forever and sometimes it'll be over in a flash. When you look back, "I'm old," after 40 or 60 years, I can't believe I'm as old as I am.