Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying.

Death: Do you never stop questioning? Antonius Block: No. I never stop.

I supply my own angels and demons. I exist on a stony beach, which lowers itself in waves toward a protective ocean. A dog barks; a child cries; the day sinks and becomes night. You can never scare me. No human being will be able to scare me ever again. I have a prayer that I repeat to myself in absolute stillness: May a wind come to stir up the ocean and the stifling twilight. May a bird come from water out there and explode the silence with its call.

When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings. Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence.

I hope I never get so old I get religious.

The theater is like a faithful wife. The film is the great adventure - the costly, exacting mistress.

No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.