I'm drawn to making movies about contemporary life. The reason I choose institutions is because they provide a limit, a boundary.

I'm interested in ordinary experience, and regardless of the precise definition of ordinary, and I've found that in so-called ordinary experience, there is as much comedy, tragedy, sadness, as there is in great drama. And I don't invent it, I recognize it.

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

I don't really know what I want, other than good sequences, whatever that means. What I find is always a matter of chance, judgment, and luck.

It is always a problem to know what an image means.

Anybody whose mind is functioning at all can't be content with the way the world works.

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.